Concept
Platelet-derived growth factor
Related people (32)
Matthias Lütolf
Matthias Lutolf is Full Professor at EPFL’s Institute of Bioengineering, with a cross appointment in the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering. Lutolf was trained as a Materials Engineer at ETH Zurich where he also carried out his PhD studies (with Jeffrey Hubbell) that were awarded with an ETH medal. He continued his research training as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Stem Cell Biology (with Helen Blau) at Stanford University. He has served as the Director of the Institute of Bioengineering from 2014 to 2018. Lutolf is an internationally recognized leader in the fields of stem cell bioengineering and tissue engineering. His research program uniquely combines stem cell biology with engineering principles and quantitative thinking. His team, composed of engineers, chemists, physicists, cell and developmental biologists, strives to develop technologies that have true biological and medicinal function and applicability. Lutolf’s work has led to more than 110 peer-reviewed scientific publications, many of which published in highly reputed journals, more than 25 patents, and the commercialization of several products. Current research in the Lutolf lab is focused on the bioengineering of miniature tissues, termed organoids, that are generated from self-organizing stem cells.
Johan Auwerx
Johan Auwerx is Professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he occupies the Nestle Chair in Energy Metabolism. Dr. Auwerx has been using molecular physiology and systems genetics to understand metabolism in health, aging and disease. Much of his work focused on understanding how diet, exercise and hormones control metabolism through changing the expression of genes by altering the activity of transcription factors and their associated cofactors. His work was instrumental for the development of agonists of nuclear receptors - a particular class of transcription factors - into drugs, which now are used to treat high blood lipid levels, fatty liver, and type 2 diabetes. Dr. Auwerx was amongst the first to recognize that transcriptional cofactors, which fine-tune the activity of transcription factors, act as energy sensors/effectors that influence metabolic homeostasis. His research validated these cofactors as novel targets to treat metabolic diseases, and spurred the clinical use of natural compounds, such as resveratrol, as modulators of these cofactor pathways.
Johan Auwerx was elected as a member of EMBO in 2003 and is the recipient of a dozen of international scientific prizes, including the Danone International Nutrition Award, the Oskar Minkowski Prize, and the Morgagni Gold Medal. His work is highly cited by his peers with a h-factor of over 100. He is an editorial board member of several journals, including Cell Metabolism, Molecular Systems Biology, The EMBO Journal, Journal of Cell Biology, Cell, and Science. Dr. Auwerx co-founded a handful of biotech companies, including Carex, PhytoDia, and most recently Mitobridge, and has served on several scientific advisory boards.
Dr. Auwerx received both his MD and PhD in Molecular Endocrinology at the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Belgium. He was a post-doctoral research fellow in the Departments of Medicine and Genetics of the University of Washington in Seattle.
Freddy Radtke
Freddy Radtke obtained his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Zürich in 1994. In 1995, he started his postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Michel Aguet at Genentech, Inc. (San Francisco, USA). In 1997, he returned to Switzerland with Michel Aguet and finished his postdoctoral fellowship at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC) in Lausanne. From 1999‑2005, he was a group leader and Associate Member at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. Freddy Radtke then joined ISREC in January 2006 as a senior scientist and in July 2006, he was appointed Associate Professor at the EPFL School of Life Sciences
Daniel Constam
Daniel Constam received his doctoral degree in Natural Sciences from ETH Zürich in the neuroimmunology group of Adriano Fontana (1993). For postdoctoral studies, he joined the laboratory of Elizabeth Robertson as an EMBO fellow at Harvard University to characterize proprotein convertase (PC) functions in mouse models of early embryogenesis (1994-1999). As an ISREC group leader (>2000) and Associate Professor at EPFL (>2007), he initially continued to study pluripotency and lineage differentiation during development and found that several secreted PCs jointly regulate cell-cell adhesion and TGFβ signaling pathways at the cross-roads of stem cell and cancer biology. To map the proteolytic activity of PCs and their relative distribution in exocytic or endocytic vesicles, his lab developed PC-specific FRET sensors for high resolution live imaging in normal cells and in tumour-host interactions. His studies on TGFβ signaling also identified the RNA-binding protein Bicc1 and its self-polymerization in membrane-less organelles as regulators of mRNA translation and cell metabolism that cooperate with primary cilia to prevent cystic growth in renal tubules and in pancreatic and bile ducts.
Douglas Hanahan
Douglas Hanahan, born in Seattle, Washington, USA, received a bachelors degree in Physics from MIT (1976), and a Ph.D. in Biophysics from Harvard (1983). He worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York (1978-88) initially as a graduate student and then as a group leader. From 1988-2010 he was on the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics at UCSF in San Francisco. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2007), the Institute of Medicine (USA) (2008), the US National Academy of Science (2009), and EMBO (2010). In 2011, Hanahan received an honorary degree from the University of Dundee (UK).
Vassily Hatzimanikatis
Dr. Vassily Hatzimanikatis is currently Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Lausanne, Switzerland. Vassily received a PhD and an MS in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and his Diploma in Chemical Engineering from the University of Patras, in Greece. After the completion of his doctoral studies, he held a research group leader position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), Switzerland. Prior to joining EPFL, Vassily worked for three years in DuPont, Cargill, and Cargill Dow, and he has been assistant professor at Northwestern University, at Illinois, USA.
Vassilys research interests are in the areas of computational systems biology, biotechnology, and complexity. He is associate editor of the journals Biotechnology & Bioengineering, Metabolic Engineering and Integrative Biology, and he serves on the editorial advisory board of the journals Bioprocess and Biosystems Engineering, Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology, and Industrial Biotechnology. He has written over 70 technical publications and he is co-inventor in three patents and patent applications.
Vassily is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2010), he was a DuPont Young Professor (2001-2004), and he has also received the Jay Bailey Young Investigator Award in Metabolic Engineering (2000), and the ACS Elmar Gaden Award (2011).
Sandrine Gerber
Sandrine Gerber studied chemistry at the "Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Paris" in France, where she obtained a diploma of chemical engineer in 1993. The same year she obtained a DEA (Master degree) of organic chemistry at the University Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI, France). From 1993 to 1996 she did a PhD in organic chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Jean-Pierre Genêt at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Paris. In 1996, she moved to University of Lausanne for a post-doctoral stay under the supervision of Prof. Pierre Vogel. In 1998, she was appointed Maître-Assistante at the Institute of Organic Chemistry in the University of Lausanne. In 2003, she obtained the habilitation to direct research from the University Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI, France). The same year, she was appointed scientific adjunct at the EPFL and senior scientist (Maître d'Enseignement et de Recherche) in 2006. In December 2014, she was promoted to titular professor. Since September 2007, Sandrine Gerber is deputy to the director of the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering (ISIC). She is also member of the Board of Directors of the Swiss Chemical Society. Since 2007, Sandrine Gerber is part-time lecturer at the university of Fribourg. She was awarded the Prize Eugene Schueller in 1997, the Prize Dufour for prospective organic chemistry in 2005 and the Werner Prize 2010. She also received a special mention in recognition of exceptional quality of pedagogic competencies in the teaching of basic sciences, given by the Direction of the School of Biology and Medicine from the University of Lausanne, in 2013. In October 2018, she will receive the Prize for Excellence in Teaching from the section of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering.
Didier Trono
After obtaining an M.D. from the University of Geneva and completing a clinical training in pathology, internal medicine and infectious diseases in Geneva and at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Didier Trono embarked in a scientific career at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research of MIT. In 1990, he joined the faculty of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies to launch a center for AIDS research. He moved back to Europe seven years later, before taking the reins of the newly created EPFL School of Life Sciences, which he directed from 2004 to 2012. He is now actively engaged in the efforts of Switzerland to integrate new technologies in the fields of precision medicine and personalized health.