Abstract
Regenerative medicine offers exciting and unique opportunities to treat currently non-curable diseases and conditions related to functional and physical losses of tissue and organs, the latter is often related to aging and hence becomes more and more common and impacts to society. While scientific research in stem cells has brought to us breakthrough one after another, for example, induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell technology, the translation from science to clinical applications has not been so rapid as promised. Regulatory approval to safeguard the patient benefits is one issue, the other is the lack of early engineering input and enabling technologies. The following technical issues, as examples, require input of engineers in order to developing multi-billion dollar industry to serve regenerative medicine: (i) scalable expansion and purification of stem cells for clinical applications, (ii) effective and controllable differentiation of stem cells, (iii) functional biomaterials for delivery of cells and stem cells, (iv) growth of multicellular and three dimensional tissues (v) quality control for tissue engineering and stem cell products, (vi) Process design methodologies and process automation.
Working closely with scientists and clinicians, engineers can develop the much needed and affordable technologies to speed up the translation from laboratory to clinics and to benefit patients and society. This will be demonstrated by several case studies.
About the speaker
Prof Zhanfeng Cui received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from Dalian University of Technology in 1987. He had his postdoctoral research at the University of Strathclyde from 1988 to 1991. He was faculty at the University of Edinburgh from 1991 to 1994. He joined Oxford University in 1994, and is currently Donald Pollock Professor of Chemical Engineering.
Prof Cui’s main research interest is regenerative medical technologies, particularly focusing on tissue engineering and stem cell therapies. He remains active in protein processing and membrane separation.
Prof Cui had received the Global Research Award and the Foresight Award from the Royal Academy of Engineering. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the Institution of Chemical Engineers.
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