TERMIS Japan: CELL-MET represents at International Conference
During the first week of September, 2018, Pranjal Nautiyal, a graduate student of Prof. Arvind Agarwal at FIU represented CELL-MET at the 2018 TERMIS World Congress meeting at the Kyoto International Conference Center in Kyoto, Japan. This year’s theme was “Integration of Industry, Government, and Academia for Regenerative Medicine.” CELL-MET (using BU Photonics Center funding) sponsored the Business Plan Competition where a few of the finalists were focused on cardiac tissue therapies.
Pranjal attended this event, with two key areas of focus in mind: 1. Reach out to industries, informing them about CELL-MET and about industry membership, and 2. Gain a sense of important aspects for commercialization of regenerative medicine technologies. He attended many expositions, panel discussions by industry representatives in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering, and keynote talks. He also interacted with companies and exhibitors at TERMIS and did an outstanding job of making additional connections for the ERC which has opened doors for potential collaboration in the future.
Pranjal found several key areas of focus from the TERMIS meeting that can be of future influence to research considerations for CELL-MET. Mostly, there was a consistent theme of standardization of materials and cell sourcing and a concern on the lack of high-volume manufacturing. One of the key areas of focus for CELL-MET is understanding the end customer needs and use of the materials and that was an area of major discussion at TERMIS as well. Scalability and having medical practitioners and regulatory experts on your teams were discussed as routes for success in regenerative medicine.
