By Heather Main
I was a little ashamed of myself that I didn’t know who half of the finalists were in Paul Knoepfler’s Stem Cell Person of the Year Award. I decided to look into it and find out what (or who) I have missed…..Interestingly, 3 of the 7 listed here are not scientists but instead are patients and/or patient advocates, showing the major impact these groups have on progression of our field. I have listed my write-ups of the Stem Cell Person of the Year finalists here alphabetically.
Bill Moss – FSHD sufferer, FSHD global foundation founder and chairman
Bill was diagnosed with FSHD (the most common form of muscular dystrophy) at 28 years old. The youngest child of a gardener, Bill became a masterful businessman and spent 23 years as a senior executive and Executive Director of a pre-eminent Australian investment bank before leaving at 52 years of age to pursue philanthropic initiatives. He has self-funded programs for industry development in Australian aboriginal communities, advocated for disability rights and established the FSHD Global Research Foundation. This foundation funded derivation of the first FSHD affected hESC and successful highthroughput modeling of the disease through development of an efficient protocol to differentiated them to skeletal muscle.
Jeanne Loring – Academic researcher
Personally I think PluriTest (the bioinformatic test for assessing pluripotent status) alone earns Jeanne a spot in this ‘hall of fame’. Her lab also leads fields including the ‘Frozen Zoo’ (iPSCs from the endangered species), translational projects in arthritis, Alzheimer disease, Parkinson’s disease, autism, and addiction as well as creating collections of iPSC lines for disease modeling and ethnically diverse toxicity testing. Jeanne is also recognized for her public work in ethics, legal issues, clinical use, cell generation and clinical use, the legal implications of patents and stem cell tourism. In December she will be awarded the 2015 World Stem Cell Summit ‘Stem Cell Action Award for advocacy’.
Judy Roberson – Huntington’s Disease patient advocate
Judy is a registered nurse, who now works as a full time volunteer patient advocate for Huntington’s disease. This includes supporting the UC Davis Huntington’s Disease Clinic, the UC Davis Institute for Regenerative Cures, and CIRM (California’s Stem Cell Agency), including legislative advocacy. She was appointed as the first voting patient representative to the FDA Huntington’s Disease Advisory Committee and is past president of the northern California chapter of the Huntington’s Disease Society of America. Judy advocates for the role patient advocates play in driving stem cell sciences towards making the goals a reality.
Michele de Luca and Graziella Pellegrini – academic researchers/clinicians
Professor De Luca, and his principal collaborator Graziella Pellegrini, have worked together over 20 years, towards the use of human epidermal stem cell cultures for life saving burns treatments as well as treatment of repigmentation and piebaldism. The team has also established human limbal stem cell culture for sight restoring corneal regeneration. Michele De Luca is coordinating the first (successful) gene therapy clinical trial for junctional epidermolysis bullosa and studies the stem cell behaviours of epithelial stem cells. Professor Graziella Pellegrini is based at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine “Stefano Ferrari” at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and one of the principal scientists on the corneal repair system Holoclar ®. Together they have achieved Europe’s first approved advanced therapy medicinal product (ATMP) to be integrated into health services for patients across Europe in the future.
Robert Lanza – ‘child science star’, CSO of Ocata Therapeutics
Reading about Robert Lanza is like reading about a rock star. In TIME magazine’s 2014 100 most influential, in FORTUNE magazine and even suggested to be played by Ben Affleck if his work leads to restoring eyesight to millions. Son of a professional gambler and growing up in Boston, Massachusetts, the weirdest find is that at the age of 14 (1969), he partially induced melanin synthesis in chicken to change the colour of its feathers for a science fair project. While it is hard to find the details of this first study, at the age of 19, with the assistance of Stephen Kuffler and Joshua Sanes at Harvard Medical School, Robert published a complete change in pigmentation in Nature using nucleoprotein from the Harco chicken and a standard cross between the Barred Plymouth Rock hen and the Rhode Island Red rooster. Since this early fascination of genetics, Robert developed methods for deriving hESC lines from single blastomeres in an attempt to avert the ethical discussions of the destruction of human embryos and is now running clinical trials for macular degeneration with hESC derived retinal cells. Robert is currently Chief Scientific Officer at Ocata Therapeutics (formerly Advanced Cell Technology).
Shoukhrat Mitalipov – academic researcher
Shoukhrat was the first to derive hESC through somatic cell nuclear transfer, publishing in Nature 2013. He is also the ‘father’ of 3-parent IVF where by ‘spindle transfer’ the genetic material of a donor oocyte is swapped out for the DNA of a mother who carries a mitochondrial disorder. This creates a new egg with ‘normal mitochondria’ and nuclear genetic information from the mother, which is then fertilised with the sperm of the father. The technique is successful in rhesus macaques but has not yet been tested in humans. Shoukhrat’s company Mitogenome Therapeutics appears to be pursuing 3-parent IVF in China, because it is not currently allowed by the FDA in the US.
Ted Harada – ALS sufferer and unproven stem cell treatment recipient
Another patient advocate, Ted has received two doses of fetal neural cells in his spinal cord from Emory University in Atlanta as an experimental treatment to slow progression of his ALS. While Ted showed improvement in limb movement, strength and dexterity from the first transplantation his abilities have slowly been regressing, leading to this second treatment. Ted is a strong advocate for “Right To Try” that patients’ choice to receive experimental treatments should be respected and will speed up innovation. He challenges the idea that patients who are out of options may need to settle for ‘silver standards’ with novel FDA approved treatments taking 10 – 15 years and sometimes nearly a billion dollars. He feels that these patients do not have that time to wait. Refreshingly, he is not a fan of stem cell tourism and the Right-To-Try movement stipulates the treatment has to have completed an FDA phase I portion of a trial and been approved for phase II.