Xu Wu

Dr. Xunwei Wu is a Principal Investigator in Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Oral Biomedicine and Laboratory for Tissue Engineering and Regeneration, School of Stomatology, Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong, China. He received his bachelor’s degree from Zhejiang University and a Ph.D. from Fudan University, Shanghai, China.

Dr. Wu did his first postdoctoral training at Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry, Germany, he generated skin conditional knockout mouse model for studying skin/hair development in vivo. And for the second postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School, he established a novel in vivo cyst assay to study the function of human keratinocytes in vivo.

His research group currently focuses on in vivo human skin regeneration by using culture-expanded cells. Recently, his group established a new system to efficiently isolate and culture skin stem cell including both epidermal and dermal cells, and the culture system could maintain in vivo regeneration potential of skin cells after expansion. By using the culture-expanded cells, his group generated a novel mouse model with a full-thickness human skin containing mature cycling hair follicle, and the model that showed the wound healing procedure of the regenerate skin was similar to that of normal human skin. The new mouse model with regeneration of human skin provides a platform to study human skin diseases including in vivo aging process and underlying mechanisms.