Welcome to the Pillai Lab

Welcome to the Pillai Laboratory at the Section of Hematology, Yale Cancer Center and Dept of Medicine, Yale School of Medicine.

Our group is interested in how Hematopoiesis (production of blood) is regulated at a molecular and biochemical level in normal and disease states. Hematopoiesis in the adult vertebrate is enormously complex and occurs within the specialized locations in the trabecular bone (variously called the hematopoietic niche or marrow microenvironment). Almost one trillion blood cells are formed each day in a normal human; each of these cells arise from a hematopoietic stem or progenitor cell (HSPC) after undergoing well regulated proliferation and differentiation. Cells in the microenvironment provide these regulatory signals. Our group is interested in implementing genome-wide biochemistry to better understand how blood cells progress from the HSPC to mature blood cells. These approaches are also being used to define hematopoietic dysregulation in diseases such as leukemia.