Robert Lanza – Wikipedia

Robert P. Lanza

Lanza at a laboratory in October 2009.

Robert Lanza

Robert Lanza (born 11 February 1956) is an American medical doctor, scientist and philosopher. He is currently Head of Astellas Global Regenerative Medicine,[1] and is Chief Scientific Officer of the Astellas Institute for Regenerative Medicine and Adjunct Professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

Lanza was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up south of there, in Stoughton, Massachusetts.Lanza "altered the genetics of chickens in his basement," and came to the attention of Harvard Medical School researchers when he appeared at the university with his results.Jonas Salk, B. F. Skinner, and Christiaan Barnard[citation needed] mentored Lanza over the next ten years.[2]Lanza attended the University of Pennsylvania, receiving BA and MD degrees.There, he was a Benjamin Franklin Scholar and a University Scholar. Lanza was also a Fulbright Scholar. He currently resides in Clinton, Massachusetts.

Lanza was part of the team that cloned the world's first early stage human embryos,[3][4] as well as the first to successfully generate stem cells from adults using somatic-cell nuclear transfer (therapeutic cloning).[5][6]

Lanza demonstrated that techniques used in preimplantation genetic diagnosis could be used to generate embryonic stem cells without embryonic destruction.[7]

In 2001, he was also the first to clone an endangered species (a Gaur),[8] and in 2003, he cloned an endangered wild ox (a Banteng)[9] from the frozen skin cells of an animal that had died at the San Diego Zoo nearly a quarter-of-a-century earlier.

Lanza and his colleagues were the first to demonstrate that nuclear transplantation could be used to reverse the aging process[10] and to generate immune-compatible tissues, including the first organ grown in the laboratory from cloned cells.[11]

Lanza showed that it is feasible to generate functional oxygen-carrying red blood cells from human embryonic stem cells under conditions suitable for clinical scale-up. The blood cells could potentially serve as a source of "universal" blood.[12][13]

His team discovered how to generate functional hemangioblasts (a population of "ambulance" cells[14]) from human embryonic stem cells.In animals, these cells quickly repaired vascular damage, cutting the death rate after a heart attack in half and restoring the blood flow to ischemic limbs that might otherwise have required amputation.[15]

In 2012 Lanza and a team led by Kwang-Soo Kim at Harvard University reported a method for generating induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells by incubating them with proteins, instead of genetically manipulating the cells to make more of those proteins.[16][17][18]

Lanza's team at Advanced Cell Technology were able to generate retinal pigmented epithelium cells from stem cells, and subsequent studies found that these cells could restore vision in animal models of macular degeneration.[19][20]

In 2009 Geron became the first company that received approval for a clinical trial of an embryonic stem cell-based treatment for use in people with spinal cord injury; in 2010 ACT received the second FDA approval to use its ESC-based cell therapy for Stargardt disease.[21][22] In 2011 ACT received approval in the UK to expand the Stargart trial there; this was the first approval to study an ESC-based treatments in Europe.[23][24] The first person received the embryonic stem cell treatment in the UK in 2012.[25]

The results were reported in the Lancet in 2012,[26] with a follow up paper in 2014.[27]

In 2007, Lanza's article titled "A New Theory of the Universe" appeared in The American Scholar.[28] The essay addressed Lanza's idea of a biocentric universe, which places biology above the other sciences.[29][30][31] Lanza's book Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the Universe followed in 2009, co-written with Bob Berman.[32] Reception for Lanza's hypothesis has been mixed.[33]

Lanza has received numerous awards and other recognition, including TIME Magazines 2014 Time 100 list of the "100 Most Influential People in the World",[34] Prospect magazine 2015 list of Top 50 World Thinkers,[35] Marquis Whos Who 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award,[36] the 2013 Il Leone di San Marco Award in Medicine (Italian Heritage and Culture Committee, along with Regis Philbin, who received the award in Entertainment),[37] a 2010 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Directors Award for Translating Basic Science Discoveries into New and Better Treatments;[38] a 2010 Movers and Shakers Who Will Shape Biotech Over the Next 20 Years (BioWorld, along with Craig Venter and President Barack Obama);[39] a 2005 Wired magazine "Rave Award" for medicine For eye-opening work on embryonic stem cells,[40] and a 2006 Mass High Tech journal All Star award for biotechnology for pushing stem cells future.[41][42]

Lanza has authored and co-edited books on topics involving tissue engineering, cloning, stem cells, regenerative medicine, and world health.

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Robert Lanza - Wikipedia