Imitola's clinical and research program focuses on Progressive Multiple Sclerosis and the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegeneration and repair in humans.
He trained at the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at the Brigham and Women's Hospital at Harvard Medical School.
[9] They showed that the inflammatory chemokine Stromal cell-derived factor 1 alpha released by astrocytes during stroke was responsible for the directed migration of human and mouse NSCs to areas of injury in mice, creating Injury induced stem cell niches elucidated by reporter stem cells, as proposed by Professor Evan Y. Snyder[10] to denote the regenerative (micro-environments) areas created after CNS damage and the ability to visualize these areas by using stem cells expressing reporter genes (i.e.
[11] This discovery paved the way for the study of the responses of endogenous neural stem cell migration in regeneration in other neurological diseases.
The work has been extensively cited[12] and reproduced by multiple labs,[13][14] and firmly established chemokines as important modulators of migration of neural stem cells not only in CNS development but also repair.