Margeaux Hodgson-Garms

Margeaux received their B.Sc, majoring in genetics and cell biology, from James Cook University, Queensland, in 2014. In 2015 they relocated to Melbourne, Australia where they received first class (H1) Honours of B.Sc from La Trobe University. During their Honours year they studied mechanisms of acquired resistance to selective FGF inhibitors in FGF driven urothelial carcinoma at the Olivia Newton John Cancer Research Institute and their work resulted in both an international conference presentation and a published paper. From 2016 until 2018 Margeaux worked as a research assistant at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University where they worked on optimising transcription factor-based reprogramming and transdifferentiation of human cells as well as  characterization of states of naive pluripotency generated during reprogramming of human induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSCs).

In 2018, they joined the Frith lab in the department of Materials Science and Engineering as a PhD student working on characterisation and comparison of iPSC derived and tissue derived Mesenchymal Stromal Cells (MSCs). MSCs are one of the most widely used and versatile cell therapies, however, a reliance on tissue donation, the relative rarity of endogenous MSCs and their inherent heterogeneity all affect their effective clinical application. To address this MSCs have more recently been derived from iPSCs (iMSCs). While iMSCs have shown great potential in the clinic, questions still remain about their comparability to tissue derived MSCs and how the heterogenous nature of tissue derived MSCs affects this.