We are proud to announce that the plenary speakers for TERMIS WC 2012 will be:

Professor Dietmar W Hutmacher is the Professor and Chair of Regenerative Medicine at the Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation of QUT, where he leads the Regenerative Medicine Group, a multidisciplinary team of researchers including engineers, cell biologists, polymer chemists, clinicians, and veterinary surgeons. Professor Hutmacher is a multidisciplinary biomedical engineer, an educator, an inventor, and a creator of new intellectual property opportunities. As a reflection of his pioneering ethos, his recent research efforts have resulted in traditional scientific/academic outputs as well as pivotal commercialisation outcomes. He is one of very few academics in the field of biomaterials/tissue engineering who have taken a research programme from the holistic concept through to clinical application.

Professor Hutmacher’s pre-eminent international standing and impact on the field are illustrated by my publication record (more than 200 journal articles, edited 3 books, 35 book chapters and some 350 conference papers) and citation record (more than 6200 citations, h-index of 39). Three of my papers in Materials Science have received citations in the top 1% for the field, and I am also ranked by Thomas Reuters 45th world-wide in citations per paper (54 per paper) in Materials Science over the past decade. Over the past 10 years in academia I have been lead CI, Co-CI or collaborator in grants totalling more than AUD$ 35 million. During the most recent 4 years in Australia, I have been an investigator on external grants totalling in excess of AUD$ 8 million. These grants have included ARC Discovery, ARC Linkage, ARC LIEF NHMRC Projects, NIH, and Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia awards. He holds Adjunct Professorships at prestigious universities e.g. in the USA (Georgia Institute of Technology).His team is endeavouring to meet the challenge to provide new bone to replace or restore the function of traumatised bone or bone lost as a consequence of age or disease. Bone tissue engineering concepts developed by his group promise to deliver specifiable replacement tissues and the prospect of efficacious alternative therapies for orthopaedic applications such as non-union fractures, healing of critical-sized segmental defects and regeneration. Another key project for Professor Hutmacher’s group has been to develop an animal model for bone repair research. His group has established and fully characterised a critical-sized tibial defect model in sheep tibiae to evaluate different tissue engineering-based treatment concepts.

Finally, Professor Hutmacher’s group is using their expertise in biomaterials & tissue engineering to tackle a different problem: development of 3D cancer models in the lab from scratch. In comparison to the 2D models currently used, the complex 3D culture model being developed by Professor Hutmacher’s group is much closer to the in vivo conditions which will allow researchers testing for example, drug efficacy, to achieve much more realistic results.

Lecture: Future of Publishing

Saturday, September 8, 12:00 – 12:45

Back to Top

David Kaplan holds an Endowed Chair, the Stern Family Professor of Engineering, at Tufts University. He is Professor & Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and also holds faculty appointments in the School of Medicine, the School of Dental Medicine, Department of Chemistry and the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. His research focus is on biopolymer engineering to understand structure-function relationships, with emphasis on studies related to self-assembly, biomaterials engineering and functional tissue engineering. He has published over 400 papers and edited eight books. He directs the NIH P41 Tissue Engineering Resource Centre (TERC) that involves Tufts University and Columbia University. He serves of the editorial boards of numerous journals and is Associate Editor for the journal Biomacromolecules. He has received a number of awards for teaching, was Elected Fellow American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering and received the Columbus Discovery Medal and Society for Biomaterials Clemson Award for contributions to the literature.

Lecture: Human Disease Models through Tissue Engineering

Thursday, September 6, 08:30 – 09:00

Back to Top

Prof. Dr. Ivan Martin studied Biomedical Engineering at the University of Genova, Italy, where he obtained his PhD in 1996. Between 1996 and 1999 he was a postdoctoral associate at the Harvard/MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technologies in Cambridge. In 1999 he joined the Departments of Surgery and of Biomedicine at the University of Basel as Director of the Tissue Engineering Research Group. In 2007 he was appointed Professor for Tissue Engineering at the Faculty of Medicine. From 2004 to 2009 he was chair of the European Section of the Tissue Engineering Regenerative Medicine International Society (TERMIS) and he is currently member of the editorial boards of 6 international journals, including “Biomaterials” and “Tissue Engineering”. His group includes scientists from the biological, engineering and clinical fields, allowing interdisciplinary work with a strong translational component. His research interests are centered on 3D culture systems for mesenchymal cells of various origins, as models to study cell differentiation and tissue development, or as grafts for bone and cartilage repair. In this field he is author of around 150 peer-reviewed papers on international journals and inventor on 10 patent applications.

Lecture: Paradigm Shift: Evolution of Tissue Engineering Strategies

Friday, September 7, 17:30 – 17:55

Back to Top

Shinichi Nishikawa is Director of the laboratory for Stem Cell Biology at RIKEN Centre for evelopmental Biology (CDB) and also Deputy Director of CDB. The major interest of his group is the molecular and cellular mechanisms governing development of hematopoietic stem cells.

He was born in 1948 and studied medicine at Kyoto University from 1967 to 1973. There he also obtained his doctorate. As Humboldt Research Fellow he worked together with Professor Klaus Rajewsky at the Institute of Genetics at Cologne University from 1980 to 1982. From 1993, Nishikawa was full professor at the Graduate School of Medicine, Department of Molecular Genetics, Kyoto University. While his research interest is diverse, he made important contributions to each field through t works on the differentiation of B-cells, the function of tyrosine kinase receptors of the PDGFR family, the differentiation of haematopoietic stem cells and the development of peripheral lymphatic tissues. Professor Nishikawa became one of the leading stem cell biologists. Through his more than 200 publications he has gained high international reputation in his area of specialization.

Lecture: Overcoming problems of iPS based cell therapy: Japanese national project for realization of regenerative medicine

Friday, September 7, 08:30 – 09:00

Back to Top

Head of Medicinal Chemistry, Chair of IMI (The Innovative Medicines Initiative) Scientific Committee, University of Vienna
Pharmaceutical Chemistry
Departments at the Faculty of Life Sciences
University of Vienna

Lecture: Essentia et Accedentia: The evolution of understanding aetiology and therapy of diseases

Thusday, September 6, 18:00 – 18:30

Back to Top

Prof. Dr. Clemens A. van Blitterswijk (1957, Den Haag) graduated as cell biologist at Leiden University in 1982. He defended his PhD thesis in 1985 at the same university, on artificial ceramic middle ear implants, for which he was awarded the Jean Leray award, the Marie Parijs award and the Klein award in the following years. He continued his research on bone and cartilage replacement primarily.

Today most of his research deals with Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine forming a unique basis of multidisciplinary research between the materials and life sciences. Prof. van Blitterswijk has authored and co-authored ca. 316 (H index 55) scientific papers (peer reviewed, Web of Science (All Databases), one of the highest ranking Dutch scientists under the most frequently cited in Materials Science), acts as inventor and co-inventor on over 100 patent applications, guided 50 PhD students through their thesis as promotor or co-promotor and currently has another 30 under his supervision.

For his more recent work he received the George Winter award of the European society for Biomaterials and was appointed Fellow of Biomaterials Science and Engineering by the international liaison committee. His group got the maximum score of 4 fives in the QANU Research Review Chemical Engineering 3TU (evaluation of chemical engineering), 2010.

He acts and has acted on numerous advisory organs relating directly to life- and material sciences or to the economic applications thereof and held positions such as chairman of the Dutch society for Biomaterials, treasurer of the European Society for Biomaterials and council member of TERMIS (Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society).

Current functions comprise: Chairman of the Netherlands Forum for Regenerative Medicine, Chairman of TeRM (Translational Regenerative Medicine, SmartMix, 25 Million)), Member of the Advisory Board of the Netherlands Technology Foundation, Member of the Netherlands Academy for Technology and Innovation, member of the High Profile Group (determining strategy of ca. 1 billion Euro of public private partnership spending), Board member of BMM (90 million Euro initiative), Chairman of NGI and NWO pre-seed grant (evaluates 50-75 start-ups annually and finances ca. 40%), member of NGI valorisation board and the TopTeam.

During his career Prof. van Blitterswijk has co-founded multiple biomedical companies and held several functions in these organizations. He acted as CEO of IsoTis (a public life sciences company in the Netherlands) from 1996 to 2002, a company that he co-founded and grew to 150 people from scratch. In his career he raised over 140 Million Euros in funding through equity and/or grants. Resulting from his work 10 implant technologies were brought into clinical evaluation in humans. He holds 3 board positions in biomedical start-ups.

Today Prof. Van Blitterswijk has an appointment at Twente University in the Netherlands where, as Professor of Tissue Regeneration, he heads one of the leading European labs in the field of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, he combines this task with the scientific directorship of MIRA, a recently established institute for biomedical technology and technical medicine which will grow to over 400 staff in the coming years.

Lecture: A high throughput toolbox for tissue engineering

Friday, September 7, 17:55 – 18:20

Back to Top

Professor Williams is the Editor-in-Chief of Biomaterials. He has had 40 years’ experience in the biomaterials, medical device and tissue engineering fields. During his research career he has published over 30 books and around 400 papers, and has received the major awards from the US, European and Indian societies of biomaterials. He has been a scientific adviser to the European Commission. In 1999 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in recognition of his contributions to engineering in medicine. Professor Williams left the University of Liverpool, UK, in 2007, where he has been Head of Clinical Engineering. He is currently Professor and Director of International Affairs, Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine, North Carolina, USA, and a Visiting Professor in Cape Town, Sydney, Beijing, Shanghai and Taipei. He is President Elect of the Tissue Engineering & Regenerative Medicine International Society.

Lecture: Future of Publishing

Saturday, September 8, 12:00 – 12:45

Back to Top