Affiliation: Bit Bio

Dr. Tony Oosterveen is a senior scientist and CNS group leader at Bit Bio, a biotech company located in Cambridge (UK) that uses proprietary technologies to efficiently and robustly reprogram human cells for research, drug discovery, and cell therapy. During his career, Dr Oosterveen extensively studied the transcriptional principles that underlie cell specification processes in the developing CNS and has applied this knowledge to generate specific neuronal subtypes from human pluripotent stem cells. He received his MSc in Developmental Biology from the University of Groningen (1997) and performed successfully his PhD studies at the Hubrecht Institute for developmental and stem cell biology (University of Utrecht, 2002). He carried out post-doctoral research at the Karolinska Institute (Stockholm) and resolved a long-standing question in the field on how morphogens in the vertebrate embryo are interpreted at the transcriptional level in a concentration- and tissue-dependent manner (Wenner Gren and Marie Curie fellowships). He continued as a senior investigator at the MRC toxicology unit (University of Cambridge), where he generated from human pluripotent stem cells distinct subtypes of dopaminergic neurons to model Parkinson’s disease in a dish. Thereafter, he joined the biotech company Synpromics (Edinburgh) to develop gene therapy approaches that target specific cell types in the CNS to treat neurological diseases. In his current role at Bit Bio, Dr. Oosterveen is leading distinct projects that use a proprietary discovery platform and genetic switch to express optimal sets of transcription factors to reprogram iPSCs towards pure neuronal subtypes and glia cells.