Lecture
Innovating Cell Pharmacy with stem cells
- Date
- Thursday 20 October 2022
- Time
- Location
-
Huygens
Niels Bohrweg 2
2333 CA Leiden - Room
- De Sitter zaal
Register to attend the lecture at the Faculty or watch it online
Will we be curing neurodegenerate diseases with stem cells in the future? A promising new area of drug innovation uses so-called pluripotent stem cells. These stem cells make it possible to grow personalised tissue grafts, creating remedies for diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ALS.
In this lecture Professor of Stem Cells, Developmental Biology, and Technology for Innovative Drug Research Micha Drukker will explain how this new field of Cell Pharmacy can tell us more about our own development, our inborne and adult diseases and how we can grow replacement tissues in the lab.
Induced stem cells
Drukker and his team investigate induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. They study how the flow of genetic information and the architecture of the nucleus determine the proliferation and differentiation. On the application side, they develop methods to produce personalised lab grown tissue grafts. A special focus of his group is motor neurons, mechanisms of neurodegeneration, and development of stem cell drugs to treat neurodegeneration.
About Micha Drukker
Prof. Micha Drukker is an expert in stem cell research for clinical applications. He gained his Ph.D at the Hebrew University before becoming a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University Medical School in the lab of Prof. Irving Weissman. He received tenure as a group leader and head of the induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell core facility at the Helmholtz Center in Munich in 2012 and 2018. Drukker became a full professor in Leiden University within the Leiden Academic Center for Drug Research (LACDR) in 2020.
Natuurwetenschappelijk Gezelschap Leiden
For more than 150 years, the Natuurwetenschappelijk Gezelschap Leiden has been organising high-quality scienctific lectures with renowned scientists at Leiden University. Each year at least one of these lectures is in English. Alumni, (former) employees and all other parties interested in the natural sciences are very welcome to attend.