Published April 18, 2018 This content is archived.
Professor Stelios Andreadis, chair of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University at Buffalo, has made seminal contributions to the field of bioengineering, spanning both fundamental and translational research, with emphasis in the areas of stem cell bioengineering; vascular, skin, and gland tissue engineering and regeneration; molecular design of biomaterials; protein and gene delivery, and lentiviral arrays for high-throughput pathway analysis of stem cell differentiation and reprogramming. Among his highly recognized findings are those in the area of stem cells for cardiovascular tissue engineering. These advances place him at the forefront of worldwide efforts to use tissue engineering approaches for treatment of cardiovascular disease. He also discovered that stem cell senescence (aging) could be reversed using a single pluripotency factor, a discovery with significant implications in the field of aging and the use of stem cells in regenerative medicine. Notably, his discovery that skin stem cells can be the source of neural crest stem cells and their derivatives (neurons, glial cells, melanocytes, muscle, bone, cartilage) is a paradigm shift in stem cell biology with profound implications on regenerative medicine as it can provide an unlimited source of stem cells for treatment of neurodegenerative disorders, for which cell sourcing remains an intractable barrier to development of cellular therapies.