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Perinatal Stem Cell Society 2019 Annual Congress
The 5th Annual Congress of the Perinatal Stem Cell Society is taking place February 28th and March 1st 2019 at the Leonardo Museum in Salt Lake City, Utah. For more information about the congress please visit the website of the Perinatal Stem Cell Society.
When we first started the Perinatal Stem Cell Society in 2013, we did so because perinatal stem cell and tissue products were not represented on the programs of other stem cell and regenerative medicine meetings. Today, we have positively influenced the industry in this regard. A large number of our past speakers are now regularly invited to speak on perinatal stem cells at other meetings. We consider this a great success for our society.
With this goal in mind, we continue to add new faculty members to our agenda in order to bring new voices to the stage and to share fresh insights. Here are some of the highlights from this year’s agenda:
- We are very excited to present Susana Cantero Peral, MD PhD, from the Mayo Clinic, who will give a lecture titled “Cord Blood Derived Mononuclear Cells for the Treatment of Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome.”
- Another impressive new member of the Perinatal Society faculty is Melissa Suter, PhD, from Baylor College of Medicine whose talk is titled “Trophoblast Purification and Characterization in Vitro.”
- Co-founder of the Perinatal Society Rouzbeh Taghizadeh, PhD, will give an overview of cord tissue processing technologies.
- Doug Schmid, PhD, of Predictive Biotech will review the use of Wharton’s Jelly in regenerative medicine.
- We have invited two speakers from India to share insights into the development of wound healing products for their market. Niranjan Bhattacharya, MD, a chair at the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine, will speak about the use of amniotic membrane to heal burns. Vinesh Mandot with LifeCell, India’s largest cord blood bank, will speak about a wound healing product called AmchoPlast that is derived from the amnion.
- Sean Murphy, PhD a co-founder of the Perinatal Stem Cell Society and now at the Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine, will give a talk titled “Amnion Membrane Derived Cells and Materials for Skin Wound Treatments”.
- Ornella Parolini, PhD, founder of the International Placenta Stem Cell Society and director of the E. Menni Research Center in Italy, will share her expert knowledge on the immunomodulation of amniotic cells.
- Stephen Strom, PhD, is coming from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden to provide a highly anticipated update on his use of perinatal tissue and cells to treat liver disease.
Joanne Kurtzberg, MD, Director of the Marcus Center for Cellular Cures at Duke University, is our Key Note speaker and will present her groundbreaking work in a lecture titled “Extending Cord Blood to Regenerative Therapies for the Brain.” It is our hope that Dr. Kurtzberg will have some new data to share on her clinical trials to treat autism with cells expanded from cord tissue. Neil Riordan, PA PhD, is also renowned for providing autism therapy using cord tissue cells and he will share results from his clinic in Panama. Finally, Tomasz Baran, MD, from the Polish Stem Cell Bank will describe their clinical experience using cord tissue cells for autism and other neurologic disorders.
Exosomes are a very hot topic in the field of regenerative medicine and rightly so because they offer enormous therapeutic potential. This year’s meeting includes some presentations about exosomes. Timothy Ganey, PhD, the Chief Scientific Officer of Vivex Biomedical, will give a lecture titled “Quantification of Exosome Product.” Rebecca Lim, PhD, of Monash University in Australia, will give a talk titled “Exosome Therapy for Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia - Are We Ready for Cell-Free Regenerative Medicine?”
As regulatory issues dominate so much of the field of perinatal tissue and cells, we have invited two leaders in the topic to help answer some of the audience’s questions about the regulatory landscape. Mike Druckman, JD, is a partner at the prestigious law firm Hogan Lovells, where he chairs their working group on Cell, Tissue and Gene Therapies. He will give a talk titled “Regulatory Questions all 361 Companies Should Understand”. Lou Barnes, President Elect of the American Association of Tissue Banks (AATB) and COO of Vivex Biomedical, will share his vast experience in a lecture titled “Birth Tissue Regulatory and Standards Environment”.