Matthias Hebrok, PhD, Hurlbut-Johnson Distinguished Chair in Diabetes Research, is Director of the Diabetes Center at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He earned his PhD in Developmental Biology from the Max-Planck-Institute in Freiburg Germany, then performed his postdoctoral research at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Harvard University. His laboratory has developed novel methods to generate functional, insulin-producing beta-cells from human stem cell populations.
Maike Sander is Director of the Pediatric Diabetes Research Center and Co-Director of the Center on Diabetes in the Institute of Engineering in Medicine at UC San Diego. Her laboratory employs human pluripotent stem cell-based organoid approaches to uncover mechanisms that control the formation and proper function of pancreatic beta-cells.
Dr. Matthias von Herrath is committed to clinical translation of immune-based interventions in autoimmune and metabolic diseases, the latter in particular being an exciting emerging field. His expertise and main strength is working at the interface of experimental research to interpret and refine early phase I/II clinical trials in order to optimize strategies for phase 3 trials and drug approval. This comprises translation from various animal models as well as human organoid models to human interventions, optimization of immunotherapies and their relative ranking, assessment of combination therapies, development of biomarkers as primary or secondary outcomes, induction of antigen specific tolerance in autoimmunity, regulatory cells and clinical T cell assays. Matthias von Herrath is Vice President and Senior Medical officer at Novonordisk and Professor at La Jolla institute
Maria Cristina Nostro is a Senior Scientist at the McEwen Stem Cell Institute and an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. She holds the Harry Rosen Chair in Diabetes Regenerative Medicine Research and she is a member of the Soham and Shaila Ajmera Family Transplant Centre at the Toronto General Hospital.
Her research is focused on generating functional β cells from human pluripotent stem cells.
Her group has defined critical pathways leading to the efficient generation of stem cell-derived pancreatic progenitors in vitro and recently, through the use of a proteomics approach, identified a specific marker that allows the purification of these β cell progenitors. Since 2015, Dr. Nostro has been leading a multi-investigator team aimed at developing novel transplantation approaches for Type 1 Diabetes therapy.