The research team engineered a synthetic HOXB4 protein with a scrambled destruction signal. They produced large quantities of the protein in bacteria, and then delivered the protein into human blood stem cells in the laboratory. "When you mask the CUL4 degradation signal, HOXB4's half-life expands for up to 10 hours," Dr. Zhou says. "The engineered HOXB4 did its job to expand the stem cell, while keeping all its stem cell properties intact. As a result, cells receiving the engineered HOXB4 demonstrated superior expansion capacity than those given natural HOXB4 protein. Animal studies demonstrated that the transplanted engineered human stem cells can retain their stem cell-like qualities in mouse bone marrow.