Dr. Anthony Atala is the Founding Director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine and the Chair of Urology at the Wake Forest School of Medicine. His team developed the first lab-grown organ to be implanted into a human and he currently oversees a team of over 400 researchers who are working to develop cell therapies and engineer replacement organs and tissues.
Bernie Siegel is an attorney and policy expert relating to stem cell research, regenerative medicine, and human cloning. He is the Executive Director of the Regenerative Medicine Foundation and the Founder of the World Stem Cell Summit.
Dr. Aparna Bhaduri is an Assistant Professor of Biological Chemistry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Her lab studies how the human brain is created, with billions of cells spanning hundreds or thousands of cell types. They also explore how the cell building blocks of development can reappear later in life in brain cancers such as glioblastoma.
Dr. Nicolas Rivron is a Group Leader at IMBA. The Rivron group recreates embryonic development using mammalian stem cells in a dish to better understand the encoded principles of self-organization. They observe both blastocysts and blastoids to study how self-organization contributes to multicellular patterning and cellular decision making.
In June 2021, we attended the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) virtual annual meeting, and recorded daily video episodes discussing highlights of the previous 24 hours. Here is the fourth of five special episodes from the meeting, featuring Dr. Sheila Charli from Cell Stem Cell.
Dr. Shahin Rafii is a Professor of Reproductive Medicine and the Arthur B. Belfer Professor in Genetic Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, as well as Director of the Ansary Stem Cell Institute. His research focuses on stem cell biology and angiogenesis. We discuss his research and thoughts on the meeting.
In June 2021, we attended the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) virtual annual meeting, and recorded daily video episodes discussing highlights of the previous 24 hours. Here is the second of five special episodes from the meeting featuring Dr. Madeline Lancaster from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology, who was honored with the Dr. Susan Lim Award for Outstanding Young Investigator Lecture at the meeting.
In June 2021, we attended the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) virtual annual meeting, and recorded daily video episodes discussing highlights of the previous 24 hours. Here is the first of five special episodes from the meeting featuring Dr. Chuck Murry from the University of Washington, who presented during the Presidential Symposium: What's in a Germ Layer session on the first day of the meeting.
Dr. Stephen Sullivan is the Program Manager and International Liaison Officer at the Global Alliance for iPSC Therapies (GAiT), an international initiative to support the implementation and clinical application of therapies derived from pluripotent stem cells to the benefit of patients globally.
Dr. Emma Hammarlund is a Principal Investigator in the Division of Translational Cancer Research at Lund University Cancer Center and the Lund Stem Cell Center. Her lab investigates how the rise of animals on Earth relates to the evolution of stemness control.
Dr. Themasap Khan is the Vice President at Civilization Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in genomics, diagnostics, digital health, AI, and personalized and regenerative medicine. He leads the firm’s scientific due diligence and academic outreach programs. Dr. Khan earned his in PhD in stem cell biology and regenerative medicine in Dr. Sergiu Pasca’s lab at Stanford, where his research focused on genome engineering, cerebellar organoid models, and live imaging to elucidate biological...
Dr. Johan Jakobsson is a Professor of Molecular Neurogenetics at the Lund Stem Cell Center. His research focuses on epigenetic mechanisms of the brain, including the role of microRNAs, long non-coding RNAs, and endogenous retroelements in neural stem cells and neurons.
Dr. Marinna Madrid is Co-Founder of Cellino, an early-stage biotechnology company seeking to make personalized, autologous cell therapies viable at large scale for the first time. Cellino’s platform combines label-free imaging and high-speed laser editing with machine learning to automate cell reprogramming, expansion, and differentiation in a closed cassette format, enabling thousands of patient samples to be processed in parallel in a single facility.
Dr. Brenda Raud is a postdoctoral researcher at the Netherlands Cancer Institute and Dr. Jason Goldsmith is the Director of Donor Medical Sciences at Seres Therapeutics. In addition to their work as immunology researchers, Brenda and Jason are also hosts of the new Immunology Podcast, a sister podcast to the Stem Cell Podcast.
Dr. Krishanu Saha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His lab utilizes quantitative and bioengineering methods including genome editing, biomanufacturing, and disease modeling to advance the next generation of cell and gene therapies.
Dr. Kelly Shepard is the Associate Director of Discovery and Translation at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM). CIRM was created by the voters of California in 2004. The agency funds stem cell research at institutions and companies throughout California with the goal of accelerating treatments to patients with unmet medical needs.
Dr. Willy Lensch is Strategic Advisor to the Dean at Harvard Medical School. Previously Executive Director of the Harvard Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, his experience in research, education, administration, science policy, intellectual property, science consulting, and outreach have combined to support and advance stem cell science and discovery at Harvard.
Dr. Sean Wu is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine. The Wu lab seeks to identify mechanisms responsible for human congenital heart disease, and uses mouse models and stem cells to study cardiovascular developmental biology, and to engineer cardiac tissue.
Dr. Jürgen Knoblich is Scientific Director of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The Knoblich lab is known for the development of an organoid model of early brain development, and is currently using iPSCs and cerebral organoids to investigate inter-brain region interactions, neurodevelopmental disorders, and neuronal connections and functions.
Dr. Vivian Li is Group Leader of the Stem Cell and Cancer Biology Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute. The Li lab investigates how Wnt signalling controls stem cells in the healthy gut and during colorectal cancer development. The lab also aims to engineer function intestinal constructs using patient-derived intestinal organoids.
Dr. Samira Musah is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. The Musah Lab applyies stem cell biology to engineer functional models of the human kidney and brain, with the goal of developing novel therapeutic modalities for human kidney diseases.
Dr. Christopher Thomas Scott is the Dalton Tomlin Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine. Scott is also emeritus faculty of the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics. His research centers on the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging biotechnologies.
Dr. Matthias Lutolf is a Professor and Principal Investigator of the Laboratory of Stem Cell Bioengineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. His lab uses cutting-edge bioengineering strategies for guiding stem-cell-based development for the assembly of next-generation organoids with improved reproducibility and physiological relevance.
In this special episode of the Stem Cell Podcast, we speak with three PhD students — Nathasia Mudiwa Muwanigwa, Sarthak Sinha, and Naveed Tavakol — about their research into brain organoids, organ-on-chip systems, and regeneration in different mammals.
Dr. Miki Ebisuya is a Group Leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Barcelona. Her lab reconstitutes developmental mechanisms by making artificial gene circuits, and studies interspecies differences by comparing organoids of different animals.
Dr. Tom Cheung is the S H Ho Associate Professor of Life Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His lab investigates the molecular pathways that control muscle stem cell quiescence and stem cell-mediated tissue regeneration.
Dr. Ludovic Vallier is a Professor of Regenerative Medicine at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute and Director of the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Centre hiPSC core facility. His lab studies the basic mechanisms controlling differentiation of pluripotent cells into endoderm progenitors from which the pancreas, lung, gut and liver originate.
Dr. Valerie Horsley is an Associate Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, and Associate Professor of Dermatology at Yale University. Her lab studies how adult stem cells within epithelial tissues maintain tissue homeostasis, wound healing and can contribute to cancer formation.
Dr. Henner Farin is a Young Investigator in the German Cancer Consortium, and a Junior Research Group Leader at the Georg-Speyer-Haus Institute for Tumor Biology and Experimental Therapy. His group uses organoids to study cell signaling in intestinal stem cells and colorectal cancer.
Dr. Sergiu Pașca is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and the Bonnie Uytengsu and Family Director of the Stanford Brain Organogenesis Program. His team has developed methods for generating human brain organoids, and uses them to study the programs underlying brain development, assembly and dysfunction.
