Clinical Applications of Stem Cells Keynote Speakers

Roy Calne Professor Emeritus of Surgery, University of Cambridge Calne was born in Richmond, Surrey, educated at Lancing College and had his medical training at Guys Hospital in London, where as a student he asked if one of his young patients, suffering from kidney disease, might have a kidney graft to save his life, but he was told that this could not be done. Nevertheless in 1959 after qualifying and working at a number of London hospitals he had a chance to return to this subject at the Royal Free Hospital and the Royal College of Surgeons, where he started to work on the technique of kidney grafting and the obstacle of rejection. Preventing organ graft rejection has been his main interest. With early encouraging results in London he received a Harkness Fellowship to continue his studies at Harvard Medical School. He was the first to use drugs to control the rejection of donated organs and this led to an enormous expansion of organ grafting worldwide. He was the first to develop and use Azathioprine, Cyclosporine, Rapamycin and Campath in organ transplantation. In 1965 as Professor of Surgery in Cambridge he started a kidney transplant programme in Cambridge and he performed the first liver transplantation operation in Europe in 1968. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974 and knighted in 1986. He received a number of academic awards and honorary degrees and in 2012, together with Dr Thomas Starzl, he was awarded the Lasker DeBakey medical research award for the development of liver transplantation. He received the Pride of Britain award for Life Time Achievement in 2014. Currently he is Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore involved in collaborative research with University College London and Cambridge Medical School on the experimental development of gene therapy for treatment of diabetes.
Simon Cool Senior Principal Investigator, Institute of Medical Biology, A*STAR, & Professor (Adjunct Research), National University of Singapore Dr Cool began his scientific career at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia over 20 years ago. He received his BSc (hons) and PhD degrees from the University of Queensland, where he subsequently held a faculty position in the School of Biomedical Sciences. His areas of studies have included age-related changes in the structure of bone and teeth and the extracellular matrix compartment of skeletal tissue that guide stem cell behavior and wound repair. Dr Cool was invited to join the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, A*STAR, Singapore in 2003 as a principal investigator. He then joined A*STAR’s Institute of Medical Biology in 2008, shortly after its inception, to further his research in regenerative medicine. Currently, as Senior Principal Investigator of the Glycotherapeutics Group, Dr Cool is focused on developing novel glycosaminoglycan biomolecules that enhance wound repair and control adult human mesenchymal stem cell activity. Most particularly, he has developed glycotherapeutic compounds and adult stem cell-based therapies for the treatment of bone and cartilage injury, cardiovascular disease, and skin wounds. Dr Cool has filed over 50 patent applications across 12 families in the field of glycosaminoglycan biochemistry, regenerative medicine and stem cell science. He has more than 95 publications and continues to foster strong strategic collaborations both nationally and internationally with academic and industry groups. Dr Cool is an Adjunct Professor (Research) in the Orthopaedic Department at the National University of Singapore. Dr Cool is currently an elected member of the Council for the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society, Asia Pacific Chapter. He is an executive editor for the journal Gene, section editor for the Journal of Molecular Histology, and serves on the Editorial Boards of Biomaterials and Stem Cells and Development.
Karl Tryggvason Professor, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School & Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm Karl Tryggvason, MD, PhD, is Tanoto Professor of Diabetes Research at Duke-NUS and Professor of Medical Chemistry at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. Tryggvason has published over 380 research articles. He is a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, member of the Nobel Assembly and Board of Trustees of the Nobel Foundation, and he has received several international awards primarily for his kidney research, including the American Society of Nephrology Homer Smith Award and Louis Jeantet and Anders Jahre awards. Trygvasson is founder of four companies including NephroGenex, Inc. (USA) that develops a drug for diabetic kidney disease.