Matthias LütolfMatthias 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.
Didier TronoAprès des études de médecine à l’Université de Genève et une formation clinique en pathologie, médecine interne et maladies infectieuses à Genève et au Massachusetts General Hospital de Boston, Didier Trono s’engage dans une carrière scientifique au Whitehead Institute du MIT. En 1990, il est recruté par le Salk Institute de San Diego pour lancer un centre de recherche sur le SIDA. Il rentre en Europe sept ans plus tard, avant de prendre en 2004 les rênes de la toute nouvelle faculté des Sciences de la Vie de l’EPFL, dont il orchestre le développement et qu’il dirige jusqu’en 2012. Il participe aujourd’hui activement à la coordination des efforts de la Suisse en vue de l’intégration des nouvelles technologies dans le domaine de la médecine de précision et de la santé personnalisée.
Freddy RadtkeFreddy 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
Patrick AebischerPatrick Aebischer a achevé une formation en Médecine (1980) et en Neurosciences (1983) aux Universités de Genève et de Fribourg en Suisse.
De 1984 à 1992, Patrick Aebischer a travaillé à Brown University (USA) au sein du Département des Neurosciences et au Département des Biomatériaux et des Organes Artificiels en tant que Professeur assistant, puis Professeur associé.
En 1992, Patrick Aebischer a été nommé Professeur de la Division Autonome de Recherche Chirurgicale et du Centre de Thérapie Génique (DARC) au Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV) à Lausanne.
En 1999, Le Conseil Fédéral a nommé Patrick Aebischer en tant que Président de l'Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Il a pris ses fonctions à la Présidence de lEPFL en mars 2000, position qu'il a occupée jusqu'au 31 décembre 2016.
Patrick Aebischer est membre de maintes sociétés professionnelles, tant en Europe quaux Etats-Unis.
Patrick Aebischer a fondé trois start-up de biotechnologies. Il siège au conseil d'administration de Lonza, de Logitech et de Nestlé. Il préside également l'advisory board du Novartis Venture Fund. Patrick Aebischer est membre du conseil de fondation du Festival de Jazz de Montreux, du Festival de Verbier et de la Fondation Jacobs.
Les recherches quil poursuit actuellement dans son laboratoire se concentrent sur le développement d'approches de thérapie cellulaire et de transfert génique pour le traitement des maladies neurodégénératives.
Yann BarrandonYann Barrandon graduated in Medicine in Paris where he also trained as a dermatologist and completed his PhD on the long term cultivation of human haematopoietic stem cells in 1982 under the direction of Dr. Catherine Dresch (Centre Hayem, St Louis Hospital). He worked as a post-doctoral fellow (1982-1983) with Pr. Marvin Karasek in the Department of Dermatology at Stanford University CA, and then with Pr. Howard Green, a pioneer in cell therapy, in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Harvard Medical School (1983-1990). During this period, he participated in the world's first transplantations of epidermal stem cells on extensive third degree wounds and contributed several seminal findings including the demonstration of stem cells in cultures of human keratinocytes (PNAS 1987), and that human keratinocyte stem cells could be efficiently transduced by retroviral vectors (Science 1987), in collaboration with Richard Mulligan at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research (Massachussets Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA). He has also participated to the transfer of the stem cell technology from Harvard University to a spin off biotechnology company, now part of Genzyme Corp.
He returned to France in 1990 as Director of Research at the INSERM and Head of Lab at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris. During this period, he demonstrated the presence of multipotent clonogenic stem cells in hair follicles (Cell 1994, 2001) and successfully brought stem cells from bench to bedside demonstrating the usefulness of a fibrin matrix to transplant epidermal stem cells. (Transplantation, 2000). Following his move to Lausanne, Yann Barrandon has shown that oligopotent stem cells are present in the mammalian cornea (Nature 2008), challenging previous dogma. He has also contributed to the characterisation of several skin diseases (Nature Genetics, 1993a, 1993b, 2000, 2005) and towards gene therapy of dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa. He is a partner in several EEC stem cell consortia (FP6: Therapeuskin and EuroStemCell, FP7: EuroSyStem, OptiStem, BetaCellTherapy).
Current research targets the role of small microenvironmental variations on stem cell behavior, and exploring the potency of stem cells of stratified epithelia (skin, esophagus, ocular surface) and of thymic epithelial cells. The lab is also involved in understanding the factors that regulate stem cell engraftment to improve epithelial cell therapy. An important aspect of the research aims at setting up a pilot clinical trial to demonstrate the feasibility of ex vivo gene therapy to treat Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa, a rare but horrendous congenital disease of the skin that results in continuous blistering of the skin, chronic wounds, fusion of fingers and development of carcinoma.
Yann Barrandon was a member of the Faculty Council of the EPFL School of Life Sciences 2006-2008, of the Board of Swiss Stem Cell Network, 2004-2009, and is a member of the EPFL Ethics Committee since 2008. He is a reviewer for major scientific journals and for major granting agencies abroad. He is a member of the board of Directors of the International Society for Differentiation (ISD) and of the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society (TERMIS) and was a Member of the Board of Directors of the European Tissue Repair Society, 1990-1995. He was elected as EMBO member in 2009.
He has given over 300 invited conferences and seminars worldwide on the biology and the therapeutic use of cutaneous stem cells including:
Gordon Research Conferences, Tissue Repair and Regeneration, June 2005, New London, USA,
Keystone Symposia on Stem Cells, April 2006, Whistler, Canada
Keystone Symposia, Stem Cell Interactions with their Microenvironmental Niche, March 2007, Keystone, USA
Keystone Symposia, Stem Cell Niche Interactions, April 2009, Whistler, Canada
Gordon Research Conferences, Epithelial Stem Cells, June 2009, Les Diablerets, Switzerland
7th Meeting of the International Society Stem Cell Research, July 2009, Barcelona, Spain
16th International Society for Developmental Biologists, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, Sept 2009
Yann Barrandon has given multiple media interviews and participated to different reportages:
LCI, TF1, France 2, France 3, RSR (Radio Suisse Romande), TSR (Television Suisse Romande), and articles in newspapers: Figaro, La Croix, Le Temps, LHebdo, Le Nouvelliste, etc. He was also a participant in the movie A Stem Cell Story, EuroStemCell, Best TV/video production, Tromsø Science Media Festival; Best short film, Scinema (Australia); In competition, Science Film Festival (Bangkok), BaKaFORUM 2007, Vedere la Scienza
He organized the second EuroStemCell international conference Advances in Stem Cell Research supported by the EMBO and held in Lausanne 8-10 September 2006. He regularly participates as faculty to the EEC funded Stem Cell Summer School held in Hydra Greece since 2005.
Johan AuwerxJohan 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.
Philippe RenaudPhilippe Renaud is Professor at the Microsystem Laboratory (LMIS4) at EPFL. He is also the scientific director of the EPFL Center of MicroNanoTechnology (CMI). His main research area is related to micronano technologies in biomedical applications (BioMEMS) with emphasis on cell-chips, nanofluidics and bioelectronics. Ph. Renaud is invloved in many scientifics papers in his research area. He received his diploma in physics from the University of Neuchâtel (1983) and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Lausanne (1988). He was postdoctoral fellow at University of California, Berkeley (1988-89) and then at the IBM Zürich Research Laboratory in Switzerland (1990-91). In 1992, he joined the Sensors and Actuators group of the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM) at Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He was appointed assistant professor at EPFL in 1994 and full professor in 1997. In summer 1996, he was visiting professor at the Tohoku University, Japan. Ph. Renaud is active in several scientific committee (scientific journals, international conferences, scientific advisory boards of companies, PhD thesis committee). He is also co-founder of the Nanotech-Montreux conference. Ph. Renaud is committed to valorization of basic research through his involvement in several high-tech start-up companies.
Daniel ConstamDaniel 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.
Florian Maria WurmFlorian Wurm received his academic training as a Biologist and Molecular Geneticist at the University of Giessen. He joined the Hoechst AG (Behringwerke) in Marburg as head of a laboratory in Virology. Working with immortalized mammalian cells for the establishment of production processes for alpha-interferons provided the first opportunity to combine basic research with medical application. In 1984 he joined Harvard Medical School in Boston as a Research Fellow in Molecular Biology. 1986 he took an offer from Genentech Inc. in San Francisco to work in Process Sciences on the development of large scale manufacturing processes for recombinant proteins. There he has held a number of leading positions and has acquired intimate knowledge in the generation of protein pharmaceuticals in mammalian cells in bioreactors (a number of which are now marketed products). In 1995 he joined the EPFL as a Professor for Biotechnology. Wurm has published more than 250 scientific papers and holds more than 20 patents/patent-applications. His H-index stands at 60 in 2021. He was Chairman (2005-2009) and is member of the Executive Board of the European Society of Animal Cell Technology (ESACT). He serves as a consultant to the pharmaceutical Biotech Industry, mainly in the fields of animal cell technology for recombinant protein production and in regulatory affairs. He works as a scientific reviewer and editior/asscciate editor for a number of international journals in the Biotech field. F.M. Wurm teaches classes to pre- and postgraduate students in the fields of Molecular and Cellular Biotechnology.
He was founder and Chief Scientific Officer of ExcellGene SA, a 2001 established company in Monthey, Switzerland. He took the position of President and CEO of ExcellGene in 2015. He retired from the CEO position in 2017 and continues to be President and Chief Scientific Officer of ExcellGene.
In 2008 Dr. Wurm was appointed Visiting Professor for Biotechnology at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China. He retired from his position at the EPFL in 2015. His laboratory is closed. With his team at ExcellGene and in collaboration with Dr. Paco Pino, Director of R&D, he continues to explore manufacturing sciences with animal cells in bioreactors.
