Steven Stice to Visit U of A

Lauren Husband

Steven Stice, director of the University of Georgia's Regenerative Bioscience Center, will provide two seminars at the University of Arkansas on Oct. 25 and 26.

In addition to directing the Regenerative Bioscience Center, Stice is the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar endowed chair, DW Brooks Distinguished Professor, and co-founder of several biotech start-ups, including ArunA Biomedical; the first company to commercialize a stem cell product used to facilitate approval of Pfizer's current cognitive enhancing pharmaceuticals.

His first seminar is sponsored by the Department of Animal Science King Visiting Scholar Program and will be at 4 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 25, in Hembree Auditorium (AFLS E107). His talk will be titled "Animal induced pluripotent cell for gene modification, vaccine production, and evolutionary selection in a dish."

Stice's second seminar is sponsored by the Department of Biomedical Engineering Distinguished Seminar Series and will be at 11:50 a.m. Friday, Oct. 26, in BELL 2286. The talk will be titled "Neural Exosomes deliver intrinsic and extrinsic therapeutics to site of injury in the brain." Both seminars are free and open to the public.

Stice, a 30-year veteran researcher in bio-manufacturing technologies and regenerative medicine, is world-renowned for developing the first human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC), which has led to 16 U.S. patents in stem cells, cloning and regenerative medicine, including the first U.S. patent on animal cloning and therapeutic cloning from adult animal cells. Stice continues to add to his first-to-market innovations. Working in collaboration with his startup, ArunA and RBC researchers, he is currently developing a new Exosome treatment for stroke that has shown to reduce brain damage and accelerate the brain's natural healing tendencies, in two divergent animal species and two stroke types.

As an invited member, he sits on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Food and Drug Administration, and is serving on the Governing Committee of the first institute funded by the U.S. Department of Commerce; National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals. Stice is the UGA academic lead in a research consortium, based in Atlanta; Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies, which was recently funded $20 million by NSF. Most recent honors include election to NAI Fellow status, the highest professional distinction accorded solely to academic inventors, and the 2017 Georgia Bio Industry Growth Award. (Source: Regenerative Bioscience Center; www.rbc.uga.edu)

For more information, contact the Department of Animal Science at ansc@uark.edu.