Conference Speakers

Professor Ghevaert is a Professor in Transfusion Medicine at the University of Cambridge and Consultant Haematologist for the NHS Blood and Transplant. He obtained his MD in 1998 from the University Libre de Bruxelles. After qualifying as a Consultant Haematologist, he did his PhD in Cambridge to develop recombinant antibodies for the treatment of fetomaternal alloimmune thrombocytopenia which culminated in a first-in-man study. Upon obtaining his PhD, Dr Ghevaert obtained a personal fellowship from the British Heart Foundation to work on megakaryopoiesis in the context of myeloproliferative diseases at the university of Birmingham. He was appointed as a Principal Investigator at the University of Cambridge in 2010. His current group focuses its work on the production of blood cells from pluripotent stem cells with the declared aim to produce novel cellular therapies for transfusion to patients. His approach combines the manipulation of key transcriptional regulators to efficiently forward programme stem cells into mature blood cells and 3D bioengineered scaffolds to recreate the bone marrow niche and increase the production efficiency and purity of the manufactured blood cells. He still has a keen interest in inherited platelet disorders (such as Thrombocytopenia with Absent Radii) using the pluripotent stem cell technology for disease modelling. His expertise lies at the hinge of basic bench-based science and translational studies and as such is supervising a clinical trial of in vitro-produced red cells in human volunteers at present.