Advances in Using Stem Cells to Treat Neural Diseases

Associate Professor Raymond Wong is a Principal Investigator at the Centre for Eye Research Australia (CERA) and the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Melbourne. He is a stem cell biologist with 20+ years of research experience, specialising in cellular reprogramming and stem cells in eye research. He completed his PhD in stem cell biology at Monash University and was awarded a California Institute of Regenerative Medicine Fellowship to pursue overseas postdoctoral training at the University of California Irvine (USA), and a Visiting Fellow Award to train at the National Institutes of Health (USA). In 2013, A/Prof Wong joined CERA with the support of a Cranborne Foundation Fellowship and a MAWA Fellowship. He’s also Founder and CSO of Mirugen - a retinal gene therapy start-up. A/Prof Wong has co-authored 95 peer-reviewed publications in the fields of stem cell and eye research. Currently his research focuses on using stem cells and gene therapy to treat retinal degeneration.

Dr. Yohei Hayashi is a unit leader at the Research and Development Center of the CiRA Foundation. He is a stem cell biologist with over 20 years of research experience, specializing in pluripotent stem cells and cellular reprogramming. He received his PhD in developmental biology from the University of Tokyo in 2009. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow in Shinya Yamanaka's lab at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease (affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco), where he studied intractable diseases using patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and the molecular mechanisms of iPSC generation. Following this, he was appointed as an assistant professor at the University of Tsukuba, a team leader at the RIKEN BioResource Research Center, and a visiting professor at the University of Tsukuba. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles, including papers in Nature, Cell, and other high-impact journals, with over 5,500 citations in total. Currently, his research focuses on realizing autologous transplantation of iPSC-derived products for cell therapy and utilizing disease-specific iPSC lines for basic research and drug development.