Experts Available to Discuss Illinois to Use $10 Million in State Money for Stem Cell Research
TOPIC: Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich ordered $10 million in state tax money to be used for stem cell research, according to an article by The Associated Press. The money will be given to medical facilities for research on adult, embryonic and cord blood stem cells. Some people oppose embryonic stem cell research and claim it is immoral because it destroys a human life. The Senate is currently considering legislation that would lift Bush’s 2001 restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell studies. Along with California, Connecticut and New Jersey, Illinois is the fourth state to provide state funding for stem cell research. Scientists believe stem cell research could lead to cures for several diseases such as Alzheimer’s and diabetes.
EXPERTS: ExpertSource can offer several highly qualified experts to comment on this story:
Dennis Fallen is president and CEO of Transfusion Management Service. He has more than 25 years of healthcare management experience. He can discuss providing management and outsourcing services to hospitals for the operation of their blood banks. He also manages a laboratory that provides stem cell processing and leukemia and lymphoma diagnostic testing. He has previous experience with a fortune 100 company as VP of Business Development seeking new cellular therapy investment opportunities as well as corporate vertical integration strategies into healthcare services.
Martin McGlynn, president and CEO of StemCells Inc., brings several decades of international experience in the Life Sciences industry to his position. Prior to joining StemCells Inc. he was President and CEO of Pharmadigm, Inc., a privately held company in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is engaged in research and development in the fields of inflammation and genetic immunization.
Dennis Steindler, Ph.D., of the University of Florida, is an expert on adult stem cells who specializes in regenerative medicine, research on adult neural stem cells and their use in testing and treating neurological disease. Dr. Steindler has been studying brain injury and repair for almost 30 years. He is a member of UF’s world-renowned multidisciplinary Program in Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. He also is a professor of neuroscience and neurosurgery at the UF College of Medicine, and is affiliated with UF’s McKnight Brain Institute and the UF Shands Cancer Center. The major research goal of Steindler’s research is to see the use of stem cell therapy become a major treatment for debilitating neurological diseases. He and his team have been working for 25 years on plasticity and regeneration of the injured adult human brain, and current adult stem cell studies in their lab focus on the use of our own indigenous populations of stem cells in the adult brain to participate in self-repair following neurological disease or injury. There is widespread interest in the use of stem cells for cell replacement therapies in human neurological disease. However, we have only begun to appreciate the cell and molecular biology of these cells, which hold great promise for transplantation or other therapeutics relying on the potential use of our own persistent stem/progenitor cell population in autologous repair paradigms. Steindler has published extensively on his studies in regenerative medicine and adult neural stem cells in major scientific journals, including the Lancet and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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