Industry Wednesday Symposia
July 8, 2009
9:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Centre Convencions Internacional
Barcelona, Spain

PerkinElmer
Cellular Imaging, Molecular Characterization and Therapeutic Applications of Stem Cells

Human embryonic stem cells are the basis for fundamental research in biology and for development of therapeutic products to serve unmet medical needs. The cells are typically grown in culture under various conditions of cell density, passaging methods, and media that can potentially affect the phenotype and genotype of the cells.  This Symposium will examine alterations in genotype of hESCs in culture and methods employing array-based Comparative Genomic Hybridization to detect these aberrations. Attendees will hear the latest developments in these methods from the scientists that developed the products and from researchers who have used these methods to make fundamental discoveries in the stem cell field. Further, the Symposium speakers will discuss the use of hESCs to generate differentiated cells for high content screening and drug discovery, as well as software solutions for identification and quantification of hESCs. Finally, attendees will be updated on the current status of cord blood stem cells and cord blood banking based on current and future therapeutic applications.

Talks and Speakers

• aCGH in Stem Cell Research/Bead-based Cytogenetics (Christopher Williams)
• Process Validation of Comparative Genomic Hybridization as a tool for Quality Control in Human Stem Cell Lines (Lyn Healy)
• Current and Future Therapeutic Applications of Cord Blood Stem Cells (Morey Krause)
• A data integration approach to mapping OCT4 gene regulatory networks required for sustaining self-renewal and pluripotency in embryonic stem cells  (James Adjaye)
• Towards small molecule screening with neural stem cells and HCS (Mark Slack)
• Novel software approaches for stem cell and compartment segmentation as well as identification and quantification of stem cell differentiation states (Martin Daffertshofer)

Learning Objectives

• Make participants aware of the genotypic and phenotypic changes to hESCs that can occur in culture
• Discuss morphological and functional changes in hESC cultures that may represent transformation of populations of the cells
• Show the utility of hESC cultures for generating differentiated progeny cells that can be used in screening
• Demonstrate that complex drug discovery efforts can be conducted using high content screening with hESC-derived cell cultures
• Show the beneficial use of human cord blood stem cells and cord blood banking.

Target Audience
Cell and Developmental Biologists from academics and industry, OB/GYNs involved in stem cell research, clinical cytogeneticists, and drug development groups from pharmaceutical industry.

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