The Stem Cell Podcast

Dr. Steven Stice is the DW Brooks Distinguished Professor and Director of the Regenerative Bioscience Center at the University of Georgia, and the Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of ArunA Biomedical. He talks about his early work cloning rabbits and reprogramming blastomeres. He also discusses using exosomes to treat neurological diseases, helping trainees move into industry, and preserving endangered species.

Dr. Amritha Jaishankar is the Executive Director of the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund (MSCRF). She is a scientist by training who has devoted her career to developing cures for debilitating and life-threatening conditions of our time and to advancing this field, through various roles in federal, university, and industry settings. She talks about the history of the MSCRF, its programs to promote the commercialization of stem cell-based technologies, and its role in the Maryland stem cell research ecosystem.

Dr. Ophir Klein is the inaugural Executive Director of Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children's and the David and Meredith Kaplan Distinguished Chair in Children's Health. He discusses his work on intestinal epithelium regeneration, which he will present at the “Tissue Fibrosis and Repair: Mechanism, Human Disease, and Therapies” Keystone Symposium taking place from June 12-16th in Keystone, Colorado. He also talks about mechanisms of tooth development, analyzing three-dimensional facial images to diagnose genetic syndromes, and how parasitic infections affect the intestinal stem cell niche.

Dr. David Hay is the Chair of Tissue Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, where his group is defining novel ways to produce liver tissue from PSCs. They use in vitro derived tissue to better model human liver physiology and to develop supportive cell based therapies for disease. Dr. Hay also founded Stimuliver, a company that is developing a disruptive liver implant to treat critically failing liver function in humans. He talks about hepatocyte differentiation, liver disease modeling, and automating the production of cell therapies.

Dr. Agnete Kirkeby is an Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen and a Group Leader at Lund University. The Kirkeby group studies the factors involved in human neural subtype specification in order to enable production of specific neurons for understanding and treating neurological diseases. They apply advanced human stem cells models to understand how hundreds of human neuronal subtypes are formed during embryo development. She talks about moving stem cell therapies for Parkinson's disease from animal models to clinical trials, modeling neural tube development, and developing treatments for narcolepsy.

Dr. Melissa Little is the President, Keith Alm is the CEO, and Dr. Amander Clark is the Vice President of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR). They discuss what they're looking forward to at the upcoming ISSCR 2022 meeting, and the future of the organization and the stem cell research community.

Dr. Kelly McNagny is a Professor of Medical Genetics and Biomedical Engineering at the University of British Columbia. His research program is focused on hematopoietic stem cell biology, specifically in understanding the signaling networks that regulate stem cell differentiation and how these cells interact with their microenvironment. He talks about how hematopoietic stem cell differentiation is related to chronic inflammatory disorders, targeting glycosylation in solid tumors, and his international career path.

Dr. Mingxia Gu is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. Her lab's goal is to develop novel therapies for the regeneration of the heart, lung, and vasculature in patients with congenital cardiac and pulmonary defects. She talks about developing lung organoids to study COVID-19, how multi-lineage organoids can mimic human tissues, and her lab's motto to "move fast and break things."

Dr. Alejo Rodriguez-Fraticelli is a Group Leader at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona, where his team studies stem cell memory and epigenetics in hematopoiesis, immunity, and leukemia. He talks about setting up a new lab as a "playground for scientists," how cancer is the "evil twin" of regeneration, and advanced methods for lineage tracing.

Dr. Nazish Sayed is an Assistant Professor of Surgery at the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute. His lab is focused on developing new technologies that drive innovation in regenerative medicine, disease modeling, and drug testing in vascular biology. He talks about developing an inflammatory aging clock, using iPSC-derived endothelial cells to run a clinical trial in a dish, and his experience as a cancer patient.