MRCRM 2nd International Meeting on Regenerative Medicine 2024

Associate professor Cecilie Gjerde graduated as cand. odont at University of Bergen in 1999, and she finished her specialty in Oral and Maxillofacial surgery at UiB in 2006. She worked at Haukeland University Hospital from 2002-2008. She was head of the clinical education for students and residents at the Section of Oral Surgery and Oral Medicine at UiB since 2008. From 2012 she has a research position focusing on stem cells and tissue engineering. She has a part time referral clinic for oral surgery.

In 2020 she completed her PhD focusing on mesenchymal stem cell in bone regeneration in clinical trials at UiB. She won the Norwegian Grand Prix 2015 for Scientific Presentations and in 2016 she was awarded both the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry`s price for scientific communication and the dental students award for best lecturer. In 2017 she was given best educator price from the final year dental students.

Dr. Haapaniemi has combined medical and research training and has run her independent laboratory for five years at University of Oslo. Her work focuses in developing gene editing -based therapies for inborn errors of immunity. Together with international colleagues, she has also described several novel genetic causes for inborn errors of immunity. Dr. Haapaniemi completed her postdoctoral training at Karolinska Institute and her PhD at University of Helsinki.  

Adrian J Harwood is Co-Director of Cardiff University's Neuroscience and Mental Health Innovation Institute (NMHII), a multidisciplinary research centre of neuroscientists, psychologists, human geneticists, and clinicians. His research studies patient derived and CRISPR-engineered induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to study psychiatric disorders, including those associated with Rare Genetic Syndromes. These activities include projects with the pharmaceutical industry and the founding of MeOmics, a university spinout company based on large-scale patient iPSC-based neuronal assays. He chairs MINDDS, research consortium MINDDS to establish patient meta-cohorts of CNV carriers with an associated NDD.

Karl-Henning Kalland, MD, PhD, is professor at the University of Bergen. He is Senior Consultant in medical virology at Haukeland University Hospital. Kalland is Group leader of The Prostate Cancer Therapy Research Group and Principal Investigator of the Centre of Cancer Biomarkers, CCBIO, an RCN Centre of Excellence.

Kalland did his PhD on measles virus cloning and sequencing and nucleic acid probe developments (1989) and did HIV molecular research at Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA, during his postdoc period and at UiB in the 1990s. Recently, Kalland has conducted a Phase I clinical trial using dendritic cell-based cryoimmunotherapy (CryoIT) to treat patients with advanced metastatic prostate cancer, using liquid biopsies, T-cell receptor sequencing and large scale antibody profiling among advanced monitoring of CryoIT effects. Next generation CryoIT is planned.

Adjunct Professor Esko Kankuri, Head of Laboratory, is the leader of the research group CardioReg at the Department of Pharmacology at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki. He is an expert on autologous cell-based therapies for regenerative medicine, particularly for wound healing and cardiovascular disease, and has more than 20 years of expertise in translational medicine. The focus of his research group is on the translational transition of pharmacological and cell therapy approaches from preclinical research to clinical application. The team has obtained several firsts-in-the-world, including the first randomized, placebo and drug therapy-controlled clinical trial with long-term follow-up of bone marrow mononuclear cell transplantation in patients with heart failure and the first in the world clinical epicardial application of atrial appendage micrografts during patient coronary artery bypass surgery as well as left ventricular assist (LVAD) implantation.

Kavlie has a PhD in Molecular Biology from UiO and has worked a decade in a Norwegian/German biotech company with drug (antibody) discovery which resulted in several patents. Later she has worked at Rikshospitalet with an innovation project within inflammation. Since 2020 she has served as the National coordinator for the European infrastructure for advanced translational medicine, EATRIS. In EATRIS the she works with recruiting researchers to EU Consortiums, training and education offers, and quality & reproducibility initiatives within the fields of ATMPs, biomarkers, small molecules, imaging & tracing and vaccines inflammation and immunemonitoring. She also works as a senior innovation manager on the European Joint Program for Rare diseases (EJPRD) program where she has worked with the development and execution of a mentoring program, MOOC on translational research for rare diseases and innovation management toolbox.  

Last year Kavlie started the formation of a nordic ATMP hub together with her colleagues in Finland and Sweden.

Isabelle Magalhaes obtained her PhD at the Karolinska Institutet in 2009 and has since 2021 been Associate Professor in Immunology. Her research projects have always revolved around the study of T cells (including MAIT cells during my post-doc in France). Her work now focuses on chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy in preclinical models with the aim to contribute in improving CAR T cell therapy for patients with solid tumors.

Prof. Karl-Johan Malmberg (M.D. Ph.D) is a Specialist in Hematology with over 25 years of experience in NK cell research and cancer immunotherapy. He is the Director of a new Center of Excellence, The Precision Immunotherapy Alliance (PRIMA) https://www.prima.uio.no/english/ and leads an international team of 20 scientists with laboratories at the UiO/OUH and Karolinska Institutet.  

Professor Susanna Miettinen from Tampere University, Finland, is the head of Adult Stem Cell group BioMediTech, at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology. Her group is a multidisciplinary research group with the aim of studying mesenchymal stromal cell behavior and differentiation for tissue engineering both for clinical applications and in vitro models. Ongoing translational and clinical tissue engineering projects (large bone defects) provide a strong link between basic cell biology, tissue engineering and patient care. In 2020, she was co-funded by the Olav Thon foundation for the project "Let's make bone". In addition, her group is part of the multidisciplinary research consortium "Centre of Excellence in Body-on-Chip Research" (CoEBoC), and in 2020 she received the grant to establish a 3D Bioprinting Network. 

Dr. Pasetto joined the Oslo University Hospital in 2022 as Director of the Center for Advanced Cell Therapy (ACT) and she is also Associate Professor at the University of Oslo. Since 2018, she worked at the Karolinska Institutet as Assistant Professor and Managing Director of the pre-GMP facility in the Department of Laboratory Medicine, where she is still affiliated to this day as research specialist.
She received her Master Degree in Molecular Biotechnology in 2007 from Alma Mater Studiorum Bologna University, Italy. Then she moved to the Karolinska Institutet where she received her PhD in 2012. Pasetto joined the laboratory of Dr. Steven Rosenberg as post-doctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute, NIH in 2013 and her research was focused on the isolation of TCR genes from mutation-reactive tumor infiltrating lymphocytes in metastatic solid cancers. 
Her professional goals is to facilitate and support the development of new immunotherapies against cancer.

Siddharth Vivek Shanbhag is a dentist from Mumbai, India, with a special interest in Periodontology and Implant Dentistry. His PhD thesis (University of Bergen, 2020) explored progenitor cells in dental tissues, in addition to bone marrow, and the use of platelet-derivatives and 3D spheroid culture to promote their capacity for bone regeneration.

Siddharth is currently a postdoctoral researcher and dentist in the Tissue Engineering group and Institute for Clinical Dentistry. His research is focused on the use of cellular secretory factors and cell-conditioned media for bone and peri-implant tissue regeneration in preclinical studies.

He recently received Health West's "Young Researcher" Award for his studies on bone defect regeneration. 

Dr. Twohig completed his Bachelor’s degree at Brock University in Canada, Master’s degree at Vrije University in The Netherlands, and PhD at Stockholm University in Sweden. He’s currently a Hjärnfonden Postdoctoral Fellow working within the Prof. Anna Falk group at Lund University in Sweden where they are working towards developing stem cell products for neural cell replacement therapy in ischemic stroke patients.