Ocata Therapeutics Inc fka OCAT

[Hank615]

Robert Lanza talks on Monday 4-27-2015 at 9:00 AM EST abstract below

Connecticut’s Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Symposium 2015 Hartford Conn.

http://stemconn.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/StemConn-Program-2.pdf

Robert Lanza, M.D. Chief Scientific Officer, Ocata Therapeutics; Professor, Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

Moving the First Pluripotent Stem Cell Therapies to the Clinic Ever since their discovery over three decades ago, embryonic stem cells (ESCs) have been touted as the future of regenerative medicine, with a heavy burden of promise placed upon them to deliver an unprecedented number of cell-based therapies. In theory, their ability to undergo unlimited self-renewal and to generate any cell type in the body makes pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) like ESCs and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) an ideal starting material for treating a wide variety of diseases. Yet, in reality, potentially serious risks including the propensity to form tumors or trigger an immune response, and technical hurdles in directing their in vitro differentiation have thwarted efforts to bring PSC-based therapies to the clinic. After decades of work, clinical trials of PSC-derivatives are finally underway in United States, Europe and Asia. Some of the recent clinical progress that has been made will be discussed, including several other potential PSC applications: the use of retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) and photoreceptor progenitors for the treatment of a variety of retinal degenerative diseases, the use of hemangioblasts for vascular restoration of organs and limbs, and to generate functional platelets and “universal donor” red blood cells for human transfusion, and the use of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) to treat immune-mediated and inflammatory diseases, among others. Preclinical progress using these cells to affect substantial rescue in animals will be presented, as well as an overview of our ongoing human embryonic stem cells trials evaluating the safety and tolerability of subretinal transplantation of hESC-derived RPE in patients with age-related macular degeneration and Stargardt’s macular dystrophy.


Robert Lanza, M.D. is Chief Scientific Officer at Ocata Therapeutics (formerly Advanced Cell Technology), and professor at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He has several hundred publications and inventions, and 30 scientific books: among them, “Essentials of Stem Cell Biology” and “Principles of Tissue Engineering” which are recognized as the definitive references in the field. He is a former Fulbright Scholar, and studied as a student with immunologist Jonas Salk and Nobel laureates Gerald Edelman and Rodney Porter. He also worked closely (and co-authored a series of papers) with noted Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner and heart transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard. Dr. Lanza received his undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was both a University Scholar and Benjamin Franklin Scholar. He has made numerous breakthroughs in the field of stem cells and regenerative medicine. Lanza and his colleagues published the first-ever report of pluripotent stem cell use in humans. Among other achievements, Lanza and colleagues succeeded in differentiating pluripotent stem cells into RPE, and received FDA approval for clinical trials using them to treat degenerative eye diseases, including age-related macular degeneration (AMD), an untreatable eye disease that is a major cause of blindness. His company also received approval from the UK’s MHPRA to carry out the first-ever pluripotent stem cell trial in Europe. He has received numerous awards, including TIME Magazine’s 2014 TIME 100 list of the “100 Most Influential People in the World,” the 2013 Il Leone di San Marco award in Medicine, an NIH Director’s Award (2010) for “Translating Basic Science Discoveries into New and Better Treatments”; the 2010 “Movers and Shakers” Who Will Shape Biotech