The 7th SHIVA Scientific Mini-Symposium has been held online today for a discussion with a special guest, Professor Tao Wang (University of Manchester), on the application of the iPSC model to genetic small vessel diseases.
SHORT Biography of Prof. Tao Wang
She is a professor of Molecular Medicine at the University of Manchester, Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, and Honorary Professor of Genomics at Manchester Centre for Genomic Medicine. She graduated in 1986 at China Medical University and then worked as a Cardiologist at Peking University Third Hospital in 1986-1991. She received her PhD degree in cardiovascular medicine in 1991 at Peking University Health Science Centre. She joined the University of Cambridge in 1992 working as a Postdoc at Clinical Pharmacology Unit, Department of Medicine, and then Department of Medical Genetics until 2003 when she moved to the University of Manchester to establish her own research group. Her research interests are in genetic small vessel disease (SVD) and vascular dementia. Her group has extensive expertise in establishing patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSCs) as a model system, in conjunction with CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology, to study a range of genetic SVD in order to understand the molecular mechanisms of the disease, especially neurovascular interaction and the blood-brain barrier (BBB) function, identify drug targets, and evaluate therapeutic options. Her research is also in the areas of vascular tissue engineering and nano-medicine.
