Affiliation: Emmaus Medical Inc., Torrance, California

Dr Joan Oliva is Manager of the Pre-Clinical Research, at Emmaus Medical, Inc, in Torrance, California. During his career, he worked from characterization of cancers to engineering cell sheets using adult stem cells. His laboratory focus on engineering cell sheets using adult stem/progenitor cells, their characterization, and their application to treat rare diseases.

For the past 10 years, the overall aim of the work is to understand how stem cells can grow, differentiate and form a 3D structure, how the cell sheets can be lifted and being transplanted on damaged organs areas. He noticed that the structure of the cell sheet and the stem cells capability to differentiate in vitro are not homogenous, indicating the difference in the cell’s identity over the cell sheet. During the process of stem cells differentiation, all stem cells are not differentiating at the same rate and at the same time. This observation lead to the development of projects to understand the cell identity and the methodologies to isolate and identify specific progenitor cells from cell culture and tissues. The isolation of single cells is an emerging field that will require the development of specific instruments to achieve this task.