Qi Zhou, Ph.D., is a professor in life sciences, and is now the Vice President and Member of the Presidium of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He is also the president of Beijing Institute of Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine. Prof. ZHOU is CAS Member and Fellow of the World Academy of Sciences for the advancement of science in developing countries (TWAS). Prof. ZHOU's research interests cover stem cell, reproductive, and developmental biology, and he is also dedicated to promoting the application of stem cells to clinical use. He has been serving as the chief scientist of several national and CAS research projects in areas of reproductive and developmental biology, and stem cells.

Baoyang Hu is a Principal Investigator at the Institute of Zoology, Chinese academy of Sciences (IOZ/CAS), known for his work in stem cell based neural regeneration and transplantation. He is the executive director of the Innovation Academy for Stem Cell and Regeneration of CAS, the deputy director of State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology, and the executive dean of Medical School at the University of the CAS (UCAS). Dr. Hu’s research interests focus on human brain development, neural differentiation and neural degenerative diseases. He pioneered the neural differentiation of subtype specific neurons from hESCs and discovered the variable neural differentiation potency of human iPSCs (PNAS, 2010). Using hESC and neural differentiation as tool, his team discovered that SIRT6 represses H19 for proper development in primates, and knockout of SIRT6 cause development retardation of monkeys (Nature, 2018). He and his colleagues initiated the first clinical trial of treating Parkinson's disease using hESC-differentiated DA neuronal progenitors. He has published more than 40 papers in prestigious journals such as Nature, Science, and Cell Stem Cells, and was granted 2 US patents. He serves as director of CSSCR and the Chinese Society of Cell Biology.

Christine Mummery has a PhD in Biophysics from the University of London. She was group leader and Professor of Developmental Biology at the Hubrecht Institute until 2007 and after a sabbatical at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute introduced human induced pluripotent stem cells to the Netherlands. In 2008, she became Chair of Developmental Biology at Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands and in 2015, guest professor at the University of Twente. In 2010, she co-founded Nacardia bv as an LUMC spin out. Her current research concerns modelling cardiovascular diseases using stem cells from patients and developing organ-on-chip models of multiple organs for safety pharmacology and potential disease and drug targets. She led an NWO Gravity proposal was recently awarded a multimillion grant for this purpose and holds European Research Council Advanced and Proof-of-Concept grants. She co-founded the European Organ on Chip Society and the Netherlands Human Disease Modelling Technology organization (hDMT.technology).

She is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science (KNAW), and is currently president of the International Society of Stem Cell research (ISSCR). Her ambitions include promoting women and minorities in stem cell research. She is on several scientific advisory boards including the Hubrecht Institute and Sartorius Gmbh.

Peter Andrews obtained a BSc in Biochemistry from the University of Leeds in 1971, and a D.Phil. in Genetics from the University of Oxford in 1975. Following postdoctoral research at the Institut Pasteur in Paris and the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York, he was a research scientist on the staff of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia from 1978 to 1992 where he characterised the properties of human embryonal carcinoma (EC) cells, the malignant counterparts of human embryonic stem (ES) cells including a pluripotent human EC cell line, NTERA2. From 1992 to 2020 Peter Andrews was the Arthur Jackson Chair of Biomedical Research in the University of Sheffield, with research focused on the biology of pluripotent human stem cells, particularly their mechanisms of fate determination, notably to neural crest derivatives, as well as their susceptibility to genetic change upon long term culture.

Recent papers include:

1.Frith TJR, Gogolou A, Hackland JOS, Barbaric I, Thapar N, Burns A, Andrews PW, Tsakiridis A, Conor McCann C 2020 Retinoic acid accelerates the specification of enteric neural progenitors from in vitro-derived neural crest. Stem Cell Reports, 15:1-9 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stemcr.2020.07.024

2.Halliwell J, Barbaric I, Andrews PW 2020 Acquired genetic changes in pluripotent stem cells: origins and consequences. Nature Reviews Mol. Cell Biol. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41580-020-00292-z (Invited Review)

3.Stavish D, B?iers C, Price C, Frith TJR, Halliwell J, Salda?a-Guerrero I, Wray J, Brown J, Carr J, James C, Barbaric I, Andrews PW, Enver T 2020 Generation and Trapping of a Mesoderm Biased State of Human Pluripotency. Nature Communications. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18727-8.

Prof. Nissim Benvenisty is the Herbert Cohn Chair in Cancer Research and the Director of The Azrieli Center for Stem Cells and Genetic Research at the Hebrew University. He earned his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the Hebrew University, and conducted postdoctoral studies at Harvard University. Prof. Benvenisty’s research projects focus on stem cell biology, tissue engineering, human genetics, and cancer research. He published numerous original and review papers on human pluripotent stem cells, and serves on the editorial board of various stem cell related journals. He is a member of the steering committee of the International Stem Cell Initiative (ISCI), the Programme Board of the UK–Regenerative Medical Platform (MRC), and serves as the academic advisor for the International Symposia of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR). Prof. Benvenisty presents the issue of human embryonic stem cells in many international conferences, and gave testimonies before the US Senate and the European Union. He was awarded several prizes among them the Foulkes Prize (London), the Hestrin Prize, the Teva Prize, the Kaye Prize, the Milken Prize, the ACTO Award and the Katzir Prize.

Glyn has a background in microbiology and cancer research. From 2003, he was the founding Director for the UK Stem Cell Bank for human embryonic stem cells. Glyn’s work has covered safety and quality issues in cell therapy, cells used for manufacturing purposes, development of novel cell-based assays genetic reference materials. Over more than 30 years, Glyn has maintained a strong interest in improvement of cryopreservation methods and biobanking of various biological materials. He has been the Chair for the Society for Low Temperature Biology (www.sltb.info). Glyn has also been a PI for a number of UK and EC funded research consortia and was a leading PI for the EBiSC European iPSC bank project. He serves as numerous SAB members for EU research programmes, a special advisor on cell substrates for WHO, an advisor on OECD initiatives. In the last 20 years his work has focused on stem cell applications including coordinating technical workshops, developing pluripotent stem cells for cell-based medicines and initiating the International Stem Cell Banking Initiative (www.iscbi.org) with members in 28 countries. His main role today is as a special expert supported by CAS PIFI program, where he advises the National Stem Cell Resource Center, on development of their research and clinical studies.

Prof. Weizhi Ji currently is a Member of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Professor and Director of the State Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research, Institute of Primate Translational Medicine, Kunming University of Science and Technology. He is now the President of Chinese Society for Stem Cell Research. Prof. Ji has been devoted to developing non-human primate disease models and to advance regenerative and developmental biology with the overarching aim to improve human health. His research has focused on the mechanisms of early embryo development regulation, stem cell pluripotency and nonhuman primate models for human neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases. His lab developed the first gene-modified rhesus and cynomolgus monkeys via Cas9/RNA-mediated gene targeting in 2014, first proved the feasibility to generate chimeric monkeys using ESCs in 2015 and succeeded in extending in vitro culture for monkey in 2019 and for human early embryos in 2020. These gives a rare opportunity to study the developmental events of gastrulation in primates and offers insights into the new discoveries of fundamental theories in embryonic development, stem cells and promotes the development of innovative treatment for neurodevelopmental disorders. His research has been published in internationally recognized journals, including Cell, Science, Nature, Cell Stem Cell, PNAS and others, among which the study of the first primates born with genomes engineered by precision gene-targeting methods published in Cell has been regarded as a milestone of animal disease model development and listed as one of the 10 technology breakthrough in 2014 by MIT Technology Review, Best Research Article of 2014 by Cell, one of the 8 Success in science of 2014 by Nature.

Xiu-Wu Bian, M.D. & Ph.D., is a professor of pathology and the member of Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is the director of the Institute of Pathology and Southwest Cancer Center, Southwest Hospital, Chongqing, China. He is now the vice-president of Chinese Society for Stem Cell Research and the president of Chinese Association of Pathologists. His research interests cover stem cell variation, cancer stem cells and tumor microenvironment. Dr. Bian has been devoted to characterization of various cancer stem cells (CSCs) from human cancer, identification of CSC plasticity and heterogeneity, and the interaction of CSCs with tumor microenvironment. He found that CSCs contribute to angiogenesis through production of angiogenic factors and trans-differentiation into endothelia and pericytes, thus generated new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for precision medicine. He also established a biobank for CSCs and COVID-19 tissues.

Dr. Kurtz received his Diploma in Genetics from Martin-Luther University in Halle/Germany and his PhD in Cell Biology from the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, Germany. He worked as Assistant Professor at Georgetown and Harvard Universities before becoming Director of the German Stem Cell Authority in 2003. He is founding PI of the Berlin Center for Regenerative Therapies (BCRT) in Berlin and heads its Stem Cell Research Lab until now; from 2009 to 2016 he joined the faculty of Seoul National University to establish a teaching program in cell biotechnology. In 2020, he joined Fraunhofer IBMT to further data related research and application in the stem cell field. His research concerns stem cell therapy and stem cell database development. He coordinates the European Stem Cell Registry (https://hPSCreg.eu) since 2010. He is member of the European Group of Ethics in Science and New Technologies at the European Commission.

Martin Pera was amongst a small group of researchers who pioneered the isolation and characterization of pluripotent stem cells from human germ cell tumours, studies that provided an important framework for the development of human embryonic stem cells. His laboratory at Monash University was the second in the world to isolate embryonic stem cells from the human blastocyst, and the first to describe their differentiation into somatic cells (precursors of the central nervous system). Currently his lab studies the regulation of self-renewal and pluripotency, heterogeneity in pluripotent stem cell populations, and neural specification of pluripotent stem cells. His work on neural differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells led to the development of a new treatment for macular degeneration, a common form of blindness, which is now in clinical trial in Israel. He has provided extensive advice to state, national and international regulatory authorities on the scientific background to stem cell research, and has delivered hundreds of commentaries for print and electronic media on stem cell research, ethics, and regulatory policy. At the Jackson Laboratory Pera will continue work on the regulation of pluripotency, and will study the genetic basis of individual differences in the response of the central nervous system to injury.

Janghwan Kim is the director of Stem Cell Convergence Research Center in Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (SCRC, KRIBB) from 2016. He studied yeast and Drosophila during his Ph.D. degree and started stem cell research after joining KRIBB in 2004. He was sent to The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, US as a visiting scholar and co-developed ‘direct lineage reprogramming using pluripotent factors’ which uses the same factors for iPSCs generation but results in various lineage specified cells (PNAS, 2011). Currently, his lab. focuses on this interesting direct reprogramming process and applies this technology in developing regenerative medicine and disease models. His team also investigates the intermediate cells to reveal the mechanism of the direct reprogramming.

Dr. Steve Oh obtained his PhD from Birmingham University, UK (1990) and is the Director of Stem Cell Bioprocessing and Institute Scientist, Stem Cell Group. He is a recognised global leader in cell therapy and holds several industry leadership roles. He was past Asia Pacific Vice President of the International Society of Cell and Gene Therapy (ISCT); current member of the Process and Product Development Committee (PPD); Member of International Society of Stem Cell Research (ISSCR); Steering Committee Member of International Stem Cell Banking Initiative (ISCBI); Vice President of Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS). He is PhD Supervisor at A*STAR Graduate Academy and has received research funding grants totalling SGD 25 million. He holds 43 Patents, granted and pending, 120+ scientific publications, written the book “Sensational Stem Cell: How to cure medical complications.” and created 3 companies: Veristem, Zenzic Labs and SingCell.

Our research is focused on human adult and pluripotent stem cell bioprocessing. Our team has developed a range of patent families for the manufacture of mesenchymal stem cells, reprogrammed human induced pluripotent stem cells and created blood cells, neural cells, cardiomyocytes, cartilage, bone and retinal pigment epithelial cells at bioreactor scale using a range of microcarrier technologies including biodegradable ones. Most recently, we have achieved a novel method of directed differentiation using CRISPR technology that will accelerate therapeutic applications of stem cells. A complimentary technology that has been developed is the use of microfluidics for separations of cell and particulates.

Adrian obtained his B.Sc. (1st Class) from the National University of Singapore. He completed his Ph.D. on stem cell biology with Ludovic Vallier at the University of Cambridge, under an A*STAR Scholarship. Concurrently, he was also an Honorary Cambridge Commonwealth Trust Scholar. He then trained with Rohit Kulkarni at Joslin Diabetes Center, Harvard Medical School, as a Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation fellow, on pancreatic islet biology and diabetes. Adrian is currently a Principal Investigator at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, A*STAR, and an Assistant Professor at NUS Medicine, Singapore, using human pluripotent stem cells for disease modelling of diabetes. He is also a co-founder of BetaLife Pte Ltd focused on the use of stem cell therapy for diabetes patients. He is a member of the Oxbridge Society of Singapore, the International Society for Stem Cell Research and an EXCO member (Vice-Treasurer) of the Stem Cell Society Singapore.

Dr. Yong Zhang is adjunct professor of National Clinical Research Center for Respiratory Disease, director of precision medicine center of Shunde Hospital, Southern Medical University. CSO of Guangzhou ATG, President of Shenzhen HHLIFE. He is also Secretary of ISO/TC 276/WG 5, and expert in ISO/TC 276, SAC/TC 559, etc.

He is an active expert for leading and participating several international standard developments. The first NGS international standard is leading by Prof. Zhang and published as ISO 20397:2021. He is also an active expert who contribute to Biobank international standard ISO 20387:2018, and National Standard GB/T 37864-2019. Currently, he is leading international standard development for stem cell.

He is interesting in next-generating sequencing technologies (for genomics and transcriptomics) and mass spectrometry technology (for proteomics and metabolomics). His team is focus on Trans-Omics studies using NGS data and MS data. He has published more than 70 papers in Nature, Nature Reviews Genetics, Science, Cell, PNAS, etc. and has published 3 books and 3 chapters about biobanking and database constructions, etc. He has 23 patents.

Ying Chen is a Guest Research Associate from the Department of Life Science Frontier at Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA). Her research interests include the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence in the field of stem cell research.

Jonathan is currently a Research Director at the A*STAR Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology where he also serves as the Division Director for the Cell Biology and Therapies research. Concurrently, he is an Associate Professor (Adjunct) at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS Faculty of Science and NUS Graduate School of Integrative Sciences and Engineering. Jonathan is the Chief Scientific Officer and Chief Innovation Officer for two Biotech start-ups, which focus on development of high quality stem cells and alternative proteins, respectively. His research focuses on dissecting the mechanisms regulating cell fate changes, and developing novel tools for the use of stem cells in clinical cell based therapies.

Dr. Yaojin Peng currently is an associate professor of biotechnology law and ethics, at the Institute of Zoology (IOZ), Beijing Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, Institute for Stem Cell and Regeneration, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in Beijing, China. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in life science and a Master’s degree in Law. He finished his PhD at the Faculty of Law, Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Dr. Peng’s research focuses on legal and ethical issues in the fields of biotechnology and medicine, intellectual property law and standards, policy and management of S&T, etc. He has published several articles in top academic journals, including Nature Biotechnology, Cell Stem Cells. Moreover, Dr. Peng is an expert of National S&T Expert Bank, a member of Expert Committee of National Stem Cell Resource Bank Innovation Alliance, the deputy secretary general of the Center for Science & Technology Development and Governance, Tsinghua University, and an external researcher of the School of Law, Singapore Management University.

Dr. Elsa Abranches has a PhD in Stem Cell Biotechnology and over 18 years of research expertise working in the pluripotent stem cell field.

Since December 2015, Dr. Elsa has joined the UK Stem Cell Bank team and as of January 2019, she has been appointed as the Group Leader of the Section of Stem Cell Biology and Director of the UK Stem Cell Bank. Her primary focus is developing and delivering a programme of standardisation and research & development that assures the quality of both research and clinical grade human pluripotent stem cell lines.

Since November 2019, Dr. Elsa is also the acting Head of the Advanced Therapies division at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, a centre of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. In this role, she leads a team focused on provision of standards, controls and research underpinning the clinical application of ATMPs, and for ensuring genomic diagnostics standardisation.

Dr. Rachel Steeg, scientific project manager for the European Bank for iPSCs (EBiSC) has a research background in the pluripotency and neural differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells. She joined EBiSC in 2014 working to establish a quality control regime and associated procedures to screen and standardise high numbers of iPSC lines from diverse sources, and has since led multiple aspects of project coordination and repository management. She currently oversees all aspects of the EBiSC2 project, working towards building an infrastructure for long term sustainability. Critically this includes engaging with iPSC research groups internationally to understand their needs and to support them in depositing iPSC line cohorts into EBiSC including ensuring completion of ethical and legal governance and data management. Additionally, she continues to oversee scientific developments in the fields of iPSC banking, upscaling, differentiation and cell line qualification.

Georges Dagher is currently an Emeritus Senior Researcher at the National Institute for Health and Research, (Institut National pour la Santé et la Recherche Médicale, Inserm, Paris); visiting Professor at Graz Medical University, Austria; Visiting Professor at Faculty of Medicine, Milano-Bicocca University, Italy; Honorary professor at Stem Laboratory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. He is also the CEO of a private society, Paradigm 66.

He accomplished most of his career in pathophysiological and clinical research at Necker Hospital, College de France and Faculty of medicine Broussais-Hotel Dieu. He joined the Physiological Laboratory (Cambridge, UK) for a postdoctoral fellowship and was a visiting researcher to Biophysics & Physiological laboratory (Harvard Medical School), Cleveland Clinic and Farmitalia (IT). He published about 100 papers in international peer-reviewed journals on hypertension, arterial hypertrophy, obesity and lipid metabolism, manic depression, renal physiology and transmembrane ion transport.

He was the Director of the BIOBANQUES infrastructure, a French infrastructure that networks 85 biobanks and the vice chair of BBMRI-ERIC a pan European Infrastructure that networks more than 500 biobanks in Europe. Prior to this role, He acted as the Director of clinical research infrastructures at Inserm and Deputy Director of the department of clinical research at the Public Health Institute, Inserm, France.

He is the Convenor of a Working Group Biobanking and Biological Ressources at the ISO Technical Committee “Biotechnology” (ISO/TC 276) and member of several Technical Committees at International Standard Organisation: Medical laboratory (ISO/TC 212), Food Products (ISO/TC 34); Health informatics (ISO/TC 215). He actively contributed to the publication of 30 International standards related to the biomedical field, laboratory analysis and testing, and health informatics. He is also a reference expert to more than 200 standards in these fields (work in in progress). He is also affiliated to ISO CASCO and ISO REMCO.

Noriyuki Tsumaki is currently Professor at the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), Kyoto University, Japan, where he researches cartilage biology pathology, and regeneration using cell reprogramming technologies. He earned his M.D. from Osaka University, Japan, and joined the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery there in 1989. He completed his Ph.D. also at Osaka University in 1996 and soon after joined Yoshi Yamada’s laboratory at the National Institute of Dental Research, N.I.H., U.S.A., as a visiting fellow. He returned to Osaka University as Assistant Professor in 1998 and was promoted to Associate Professor at the Department of Bone and Cartilage Biology in 2007. Noriyuki joined CiRA as Professor in 2011.

Alex Zhang, PhD, is the co-founder and president of Zephyrm Biotechnologies, a start-up company that is dedicated to the development of pluripotent stem cell derived therapeutic products. Prior to starting Zephyrm, Alex was the Head of China R&D and Chief Scientific Officer of Asia-Pacific R&D Hub of Sanofi, where he oversaw R&D activities across the AP region. He is also a professor of neurobiology at Capital Medical University (Beijing), where he leads various research projects in the field of regenerative medicine. Alex holds a BS from University of Science and Technology of China and earned his Ph.D. from Northwestern University. His postdoctoral training was at Stanford University.

Dr Cedric Ghevaert MD PhD FRCP FRCPath

Dr Ghevaert is a senior Lecturer in Transfusion Medicine at the University of Cambridge and Consultant Haematologist for the NHS Blood and Transplant. He obtained his MD in 1998 from the University Libre de Bruxelles. After qualifying as a Consultant Haematologist, he did his PhD in Cambridge to develop recombinant antibodies for the treatment of fetomaternal alloimmune thrombocytopenia which culminated in a first-in-man study. Upon obtaining his PhD, Dr Ghevaert obtained a personal fellowship from the British Heart Foundation to work on megakaryopoiesis in the context of myeloproliferative diseases at the university of Birmingham. He was appointed as a Principal Investigator at the University of Cambridge in 2010. His current group focuses its work on the production of blood cells from pluripotent stem cells with the declared aim to produce novel cellular therapies for transfusion to patients. His approach combines the manipulation of key transcriptional regulators to efficiently forward programme stem cells into mature blood cells and 3D bioengineered scaffolds to recreate the bone marrow niche and increase the production efficiency and purity of the manufactured blood cells. He still has a keen interest in inherited platelet disorders (such as Thrombocytopenia with Absent Radii) using the pluripotent stem cell technology for disease modelling. His expertise lies at the hinge of basic bench-based science and translational studies and as such will be supervising a clinical trial of in vitro-produced red cells in human volunteers in 2021.

Jane Lebkowski has been actively involved in the development of cell and gene therapies since 1986 and is President of Regenerative Patch Technologies (RPT), a biotechnology firm developing composite stem cell-based implants targeting restoration of retinal architecture and function in patients with macular degeneration. In this role, Dr Lebkowski oversees all of RPT’s operations.

From 2013-2017, Jane Lebkowski also served as Chief Scientific Officer and President of R&D at Asterias Biotherapeutics Inc, where she headed all preclinical, product, regulatory, and clinical development of Asterias’ regenerative medicine and dendritic cell based-cancer immunotherapy products. Prior to joining Asterias, Dr. Lebkowski was Senior Vice President of Regenerative Medicine and Chief Scientific Officer at Geron Corporation. Dr. Lebkowski led Geron’s human embryonic stem cell program from 1998-2012 and was responsible for all research, preclinical development, product development, manufacturing, and clinical development activities supporting cell-based therapies for several regenerative medicine indications including spinal cord injury and cardiovascular disease. From 1986-1998, Dr. Lebkowski was Vice President of Research and Development at Applied Immune Sciences where she directed activities to develop T cell-based cancer immunotherapies for solid tumors, hematologic malignancies and AIDs. Following the acquisition of Applied Immune Sciences by Rhone Poulenc Rorer (RPR, currently Sanofi), Dr. Lebkowski remained at RPR as Vice President of Discovery Research. During Dr. Lebkowski’s tenure at RPR, she coordinated preclinical investigations of gene therapy approaches for treatment of cancer, cardiovascular disease and nervous system disorders, and directed vector formulations and delivery development. Dr. Lebkowski received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Princeton University in 1982, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Genetics, Stanford University in 1986.

Dr. Lebkowski has published over 80 peer reviewed publications and has 19 issued U.S. patents. Dr. Lebkowski has served on the board of Directors of the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy and the International Society Stem Cell Research along with numerous scientific advisory boards and professional committees.

Dr. Kapil Bharti obtained his Ph.D. from J.W. Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany, graduating summa cum laude. His Ph.D. work involved research in the areas of heat stress, chaperones, and epigenetics. He did his postdoc at the National Institutes of Health, where he published numerous papers in the areas of transcription regulation, pigment cell biology, and developmental biology of the eye. His lab at the National Eye Institute recently received approval for the first U.S. phase I/IIa trial to test autologous iPSC-derived RPE patch in AMD patients. Currently, he is co-developing a dual RPE/photoreceptor cell therapy with Opsis Therapeutics. He has given several keynote lectures, won several awards including being the first Earl Stadtman Tenure Track Investigator at NEI, NIH Director’s award and NEI Director’s Dr. Karl Kupfer Visionary award for his revolutionary work on developing ocular cell-therapies, and serves on the advisory board of several companies and patient-advocacy groups. His current work as a Senior Investigator at NEI involves understanding mechanism of retinal degenerative diseases using induced pluripotent stem cell derived eye cells and tissues, and developing cell-based and drug-based therapies for such diseases.

Prof. Reubinoff received his M.D. degree from the Hebrew University - Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem, Israel, and completed his residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Hadassah Medical Center. He holds a PhD degree in developmental biology from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Prof. Reubinoff serves as Chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Hadassah University Medical Center, Jerusalem and is the director of the Sidney and Judy Swartz Embryonic Stem Cell Research Center of the Goldyne Savad Institute of Gene Therapy at Hadassah. He founded and serves as the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) of Cell Cure Neurosciences Ltd.

Roger Barker is the Professor of Clinical Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge and Consultant Neurologist at the Addenbrooke’s Hospital Cambridge. He is a PI in the MRC-Wellcome Trust Stem Cell Institute in Cambridge and Director of the MRC funded UKRMP Stem and Engineered cell hub. His research seeks to better define the clinical heterogeneity of two common neurodegenerative disorders of the CNS- namely Parkinson’s (PD) and Huntington’s disease (HD). This has helped him define the best way by which to take new therapies into the clinic including novel experimental therapeutics.

I am a Professor of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at the University of Liverpool, UK. My research addresses the safety, efficacy and mechanisms of action of cell-based regenerative medicine therapies for the treatment of renal and neurological diseases. We develop non-invasive imaging strategies to assess the behaviour of administered cells and their effects on organ function in vivo, and use advanced microscopy and histological techniques to assess cell fate and the host tissue response. We also investigate the role of biomaterials in the regulation of stem cell behaviour.

I coordinate the H2020 RenalToolBox Network https://renaltoolbox.org/. The overarching goal of this project is to develop novel tools and technologies to assess the safety and efficacy of various types of mesenchymal stromal cells and their derived extracellular vesicles in renal disease. My group is also developing novel biomaterials for supporting the growth and differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) to specific lineages, in particular, neuronal lineages. We are also developing non-invasive imaging strategies to assess the fate and functional activity of hPSC-derived dopaminergic neuron progenitors in rodent models of Parkinson’s disease.

Shugo Tohyama is a Lecturer at Department of Cardiology, Keio University School of Medicine, Japan. He graduated from Keio University School of Medicine, and got his M.D. in 2006. After completing the residency program, he has started the basic researches using human PSCs as a graduate student at the Department of Cardiology, Keio University School of Medicine (Prof. Fukuda Lab) since 2008, and finished his Ph.D. in 2013. Then, he had a position as a Ph.D. research fellow in Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He was promoted to a lecturer at Keio University School of Medicine in 2018. Currently, his group focuses on cardiac regenerative medicine with human iPSCs based on stem cell metabolism.

Jianchao Gao, M.D., Chief reviewer in the clinical department of biological products, Center for Drug Evaluation (CDE), National Medical Products Administration (NMPA).

He received his M.D. from Peking University Health Science Center and had engaged in pharmacovigilance and post marketing safety evaluation of medical products in NMPA. He is acting as the clinical reviewer of cell and gene therapy products, including cellular immunotherapy products, CAR-T, stem cell products and gene therapeutic products, he is responsible for the implementation of regulatory scientific research and drafting guidance on cell and gene therapy products.

Rosario Isasi, J.D., M.P.H., is a Research Assistant Professor at the Dr. John T. Macdonald Foundation Department of Human Genetics at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. She holds multiple appointments, including at the John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics and the Interdisciplinary Stem Cell Institute.

Prof. Isasi’s research is devoted to identifying and analyzing the social, ethical and policy dimensions of novel and disruptive genetic technologies, such as gene editing and synthetic biology. She has built an international reputation as a scholar with particular expertise in the area of international comparative law and ethics regarding genomics and regenerative medicine.