#  At 10 years, HSCI looks to the clinic 

 



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*HSCI Co-director Doug Melton, PhD, delivers the opening keynote at the Ninth Annual HSCI Malkin Retreat.*### “The future is now,” said scientists at Annual Malkin Retreat

“Many of the tools that we take for granted today, we weren’t even talking about 10 years ago,” said HSCI Executive Director Brock Reeve, MPhil, MBA, in his welcoming remarks at the Ninth Annual HSCI Malkin Retreat. “Accomplishing this work has required great individual science, as well as a community of like-interested scientists (note I didn’t say like-minded) who compared notes in order to do better work together.”

In recognition of the Institute’s founding a decade ago, co-organizers John Rinn, PhD, and Andrew Brack, PhD, invited no outside speakers; opting for a strictly family affair. This provided an opportunity to feature the leaders who built the HSCI, introduce new faces, and discuss the current state of stem cell science at Harvard.

HSCI Co-director Doug Melton, PhD, gave the opening keynote. “It’s taken a decade to do what I’m going to show you,” he said, before covering his lab’s ongoing journey toward getting stem cells to differentiate into insulin-producing beta cells.

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Melton emphasized that his motivation and HSCI’s mission remains advancing stem cell discoveries into the clinic. “We’re trying to understand stem cell biology for two reasons,” he said. “One is to get them into patients and the other is to use them to develop drugs.”

Next, Steve Hyman, MD, who was provost of Harvard when HSCI was founded and responsible for introducing Co-directors Melton and David Scadden, MD, to each other, spoke about his pursuit of new therapeutics for psychiatric illnesses.

Hyman was followed by HSCI’s newest addition, Ya-Chieh Hsu, PhD, a recently appointed faculty member in Harvard’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, who gave an overview of her work on hair regeneration.

The full program of the retreat, made possible by the support of Tony and Shelley Malkin, included a packed poster session, a postdoctoral fellow lightning round, a forum on cell therapy challenges and opportunities, and a talk by Derrick Rossi, PhD, on reprogramming blood.

“This has been a spectacular day in thinking about where we are beyond the original conception that Doug and I had about stem cell research,” said Scadden in his closing keynote address.