Erin R. Ochoa, M.D. Dr. Erin R. Ochoa received her medical doctoral degree at Emory University School of Medicine in 1996. A residency in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology was obtained at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in 2000. Dr. Ochoa continued her training at Harvard as a Clinical Fellow in gastrointestinal and hepatic pathology and joined the Department of Surgery to work on tissue engineering of the liver with Dr. Joseph P. Vacanti. She moved to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine to become Assistant Professor of Pathology in 2002 and was later awarded an NIH Mentored Scientific Teaching Award (K08). She transferred her grant and professorship to the University of Pittsburgh September of 2004 where she currently in the division of Transplantation Pathology and is a member of the Starzl Transplantation Institute and the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Dr. Ochoa is a member of the Division of Transplantation Pathology. More information about this division is available here. Visit Dr. Ochoa's personal web page Office Location: Division of Transplantation Pathology Department of Pathology UPMC-Montefiore University Hospital Suite E-739 200 Lothrop Street Pittsburgh, PA 15213-2582 Contact Information: Office Phone: (412) 647-7645 Fax: (412) 647-5237 Email Address: ochoaer@upmc.edu Research Interests: Liver senescence, regeneration and proliferation Telomerase controlled hepatic growth and regulation Growth factors and receptors in hepatocytes Liver-directed gene therapy has the potential to treat a variety of hepatic and systemic diseases. Both transposons and retroviral vectors are a promising tool for in vivo gene delivery because of the ability to stably express therapeutic genes as well as infect resting cells. Telomere shortening results in cellular senescence. Telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) not only plays a role in maintaining telomere length, but also has been shown to promote proliferation of resting cells. Sleeping Beauty transposon and lentiviral vectors with an albumin promoter and an enhancer are promising tools for in vivo gene delivery restricted to hepatocytes. Overexpression of TERT in primary hepatocytes using these delivery vehicles may enhance proliferation and decrease cellular senescence in primary hepatocytes. Such transduced cells would then be useful for a variety of studies including hepatocyte transplantation, ex vivo therapy and tissue engineering. Selected Publications: Rubin EM, Martin AA, Thung SN, Gerber MA: Morphometric and immunohistochemical characterization of human liver regeneration. American Journal of Pathology 147(2):397-404, 1995. Ogawa K, Ochoa ER, Borenstein J, Tanaka K, Vacanti JP. The generation of functionally differentiated, three-dimensional hepatic tissue from two-dimensional sheets of progenitor small hepatocytes and non-parenchymal cells. Transplantation 77(12):1783-1789, 2004. Ochoa ER, Vacanti JP. Developing a core platform for the tissue engineering of vital organs.Transplantation Reviews;15(4):184-99, 2001. Ochoa ER, Vacanti JP. An overview of the pathology and approaches to tissue engineering. Annuals of the New York Academy of Sciences 979:10-26, 2002.