The 1st Meeting of the Series Bridging Biomedical Worlds: “Turning Obstacles into Opportunities for Stem Cell Therapy”

PARIS

Stem cells hold great promise for treating a variety of human diseases and injuries. Basic and translational stem cell research is among the most competitive fields in the life sciences. We have co-organized the first Bridging Biomedical Worlds conference of our new series of international scientific meetings: “Turning Obstacles into Opportunities for Stem Cell Therapy.”

The goal of this conference is to promote progress in the translation of basic stem cell research into stem cell therapies. To do this, presentations will highlight diverse areas of on-going stem cell biology research. In addition, panelists will discuss obstacles to translation and the associated risks and ethical controversies. These panels will provide a means to accelerate communication and cooperation among researchers, bioengineers, clinicians and industry scientists, and will explore ways to implement international policies, regulations and guidelines to ensure the development of safe and effective stem cell therapies worldwide. Participants will hear about the latest basic and translational stem cell research from more than 20 distinguished speakers from China, Japan, Europe and the United States.

This conference held in Beijing, China, October 13-15, 2014 is co-organized by the Fondation IPSEN, AAAS/Science and AAAS/Science Translational Medicine, in association with Fred Gage (Salk Institute for Biological Studies) and Qi Zhou (Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences).

About AAAS/Science
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science (www.sciencemag.org) as well as Science Translational Medicine (www.sciencetranslationalmedicine.org) and Science Signaling (www.sciencesignaling.org). AAAS was founded in 1848, and includes some 261 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of 1 million. The non-profit AAAS (www.aaas.org) is open to all and fulfills its mission to “advance science and serve society” not only by publishing the very best scientific research but also through initiatives in science policy, international programs and science education.
www.sciencemag.org

About AAAS/Science Translational Medicine
Science Translational Medicine, launched in October 2009, is the newest journal published by AAAS/Science. The goal of Science Translational Medicine is to promote human health by providing a forum for communicating the latest biomedical research findings from basic, translational, and clinical researchers from all established and emerging disciplines relevant to medicine. Despite 50 years of advances in our fundamental understanding of human biology and the emergence of powerful new technologies, the translation of this knowledge into effective new treatments and health measures has been slow. This paradox illustrates the daunting complexity of the challenges faced by translational researchers as they apply the basic discoveries and experimental approaches of modern science to the alleviation of human suffering. A major goal of Science Translational Medicine is to publish papers that identify and fill the scientific knowledge gaps at the junction of basic research and medical application in order to accelerate the translation of scientific knowledge into new methods for preventing, diagnosing and treating human disease.
www.sciencetranslationalmedicine.org

About the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Institute of Zoology (IOZ), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), is one of the leading research institutions in China. The institute consists of 76 professors (including 2 members of Chinese Academy of Sciences), 3 state key research laboratories and 1 zoological museum. The major research areas of IOZ include animal sciences, cell membrane biology, stem cells and reproduction. The stem cell research teams of IOZ include over 10 PIs, and they mainly focus on questions related to the establishment of pluripotent stem cell lines, neural stem cell induction and regeneration, mechanism studies of pluripotency and differentiation regulation of embryonic stem cells, animal model establishment and functional studies, etc. The major achievements in the field of stem cell research made by IOZ faculties include: obtained the first healthy animal (‘Xiaoxiao’ the mouse) using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) via tetraploid complementation method, identified molecular markers for the evaluation of pluripotency levels of stem cells and the related regulatory mechanisms, achieved cell fate conversion across different germ layers, established various types of human and mouse embryonic stem cell lines, as well as the Beijing Stem Cell Bank, etc. These achievements has once been selected as one of the “TIME’S Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs” in 2009, and twice been selected as “Top 10 Breakthroughs in Science and Technology in China”. The Beijing Stem Cell Bank now functions as a resource for stem cell and regenerative medicine studies, providing various types of embryonic stem cell lines, adult stem cell lines and somatic cell lines for many research groups. IOZ also hosts modern animal model research centers for pigs and monkeys, which have generated a few valuable animal models for disease mechanism studies and pharmaceutical researches.
www.english.ioz.cas.cn

About the Fondation Ipsen
Established in 1983 under the aegis of the Fondation de France, the mission of the Fondation Ipsen is to contribute to the development and dissemination of scientific knowledge. The long-standing action of the Fondation Ipsen aims at fostering the interaction between researchers and clinical practitioners, which is essential due to the extreme specialization of these professions. The ambition of the Fondation Ipsen is to initiate a reflection about the major scientific issues of the forthcoming years. It has developed an important international network of scientific experts who meet regularly at meetings known as Colloques Médecine et Recherche, dedicated to five main themes: Alzheimer’s disease, neurosciences, longevity, endocrinology and cancer science. Moreover the Fondation Ipsen has started since 2007 several meetings in partnership with the Salk Institute, the Karolinska Institutet, the Massachusetts General Hospital, the Days of Molecular Medicine Global Foundation as well as with the science journals Nature, Cell and Science. The Fondation Ipsen has published over one hundred books and has awarded more than 250 prizes and research grants.
www.fondation-ipsen.org