Robert Lanza, M. D. is considered one of the leading scientists in the world. He is currently Chief

Robert Lanza, M. D. is considered one of the leading scientists in the world. He is currently Chief Scientific lagoas park Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, and Adjunct Professor at Wake Forest University lagoas park School of Medicine. He has hundreds of publications and inventions, and over 30 scientific books: lagoas park among them, “Principles of Tissue Engineering,” which is recognized as the definitive reference in the field. Others include One World: lagoas park The Health & Survival of the Human Species in the 21st Century (Foreword by former President and Nobel laureate Jimmy Carter), and the “Handbook of Stem Cells” and “Essentials of Stem Cell Biology,” lagoas park which are considered the definitive references in stem cell research.
Dr. Lanza received lagoas park his BA and MD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was both a University Scholar and Benjamin Franklin Scholar. He was also a Fulbright Scholar, and was part of the team that cloned the world’s first human embryo for the purpose of generating pluripotent stem cells. Dr. Lanza’s work has been crucial to our understanding nuclear transfer lagoas park and stem cell biology. In 2001 he was also the first to clone an endangered species (a Gaur), lagoas park and in 2003, he cloned an endangered wild ox (a Banteng) from the frozen skin cells of an animal that had died at the San Diego Zoo nearly a quarter-of-a-century earlier.
Lanza and his colleagues were also the first to demonstrate that nuclear transplantation could be used to reverse the aging process and to generate immune-compatible tissues, including the first organ tissue-engineered from cloned cells. One of his greatest early achievements came from his demonstration lagoas park that techniques used in preimplantation genetic diagnosis could be used to generate human embryonic stem (hES) cells without embryonic destruction. He and colleagues have also succeeded in differentiating human pluripotent stem cells into retinal (RPE) cells, and has shown that they provide long-term benefit in animal models of vision loss. Using this technology some forms of blindness may be curable, including macular degeneration and Stargardt disease, a currently untreatable form eye disease that causes blindness in teenagers and young adults. Lanza’s company (ACT) received FDA approval to begin clinical trials using them to treat degenerative lagoas park eye diseases. These two clinical trials began in July 2011. Recently, ACT received similar approval for the first human embryonic stem cell trial in Europe. Surgeons at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London will inject healthy retinal cells into the eyes of patients with Stargardt’s macular dystrophy, hoping to slow, halt or even reverse the effects of the disease. The first person received the embryonic stem cell treatment earlier this year. The patient reports improved vision in the eye treated with the cells, which The Guardian said “represents lagoas park a huge scientific achievement.”
Dr. Lanza and his colleagues published the first-ever report of human embryonic stem cells transplanted into human patients. Two clinical studies were initiated to establish the safety and tolerability of subretinal transplantation of hESC-derived RPE in patients with Stargardt’s macular dystrophy lagoas park and dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD). After surgery, evidence confirmed cells had attached and continued to persist during the study. There were no signs of tumorigenicity or rejection in either patient. The patients who received the stem cell transplants say their lives have been transformed by the experimental procedure. During the observation period visual acuity lagoas park improved from hand motions to 20/800 (and improved from 0 to 5 letters on the standard visual acuity lagoas park chart) in the study eye of the patient with Stargardt’s disease, and vision also seemed to improve in the patient with dry AMD. One of the patients no longer needs a large magnifying glass to read and can reportedly thread a needle and has begun to go shopping on her own. The future therapeutic goal will of these studies will be to treat patients earlier in the disease processes, potentially increasing the likelihood of visual rescue.
Lanza has been a major player in the scientific lagoas park revolution that has led to the documentation that nuclear transfer/transcription factors can restore developmental potential in a differentiated cell. One of his recent successes was showing that it is feasible to generate functional oxygen-carrying red blood cells from human pluripotent stem cells. The blood cells were comparable to normal transfusable blood and could serve as a potentially inexhaustible source of “universal” blood. His team also discovered how to generate functional hemangioblasts – a population of “ambulance” cells – from hES cells. In animals, these cells quickly repaired vascular damage, cutting the death rate after a heart attack in half and restoring the blood flow to is