Leadership Team

Professor Xu is a founder and Scientific Advisor of ImStem. He is currently serving as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at University of Macau. In the past, he had served as Associate Professor for eight years at the Department of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Director of Stem Cell Institute of University of Connecticut Health Center and senior scientist for seven years at WiCell Research Institute.

Professor Xu is a world-renowned scientist specializing in stem cell pluripotency and differentiation. He has made several breakthroughs that accelerate the progress in stem cell field. During his time at WiCell institute, Professor Xu established an embryonic stem cell (ES) feeder-free and serum-free culture system, which has become the mainstream cell culture system around the world. He is one of key inventors of ImStem’s T-MSC differentiation technology that is fundamental in making T-MSC into an off the shelf cell therapy product. He has recently developed an advanced method of differentiating pluripotent stem cells into MSCs under 3D spheroid culture conditions and a room temperature storage technology for stem cells. This technology could significantly eliminate restrictions and reduce the cost of stem cell manufacturing, storage and transportation which make stem cell therapy more accessible to patients. Professor Xu has won many awards and prizes, including First Place of Bank of China’s Trophy One Million Dollar Macau Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition; International Research Award of Royan Institute; Connecticut United for Research Excellence (CURE). To date, he has authored over 100 publications and been granted over 10 patents around the globe.

Professor Xu received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo, Japan, followed with postdoctoral trainings at both Bar-Ilan University in Israel and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States. Professor Xu received BM and MA in medical sciences from South China University and Central South University in China, respectively.

Dr.Chung is the Principle Scientist of ImStem. He is also an assistant professor of the Department of Psychiatry at Yale Medical School. As a world leading scientist and the inventor of somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) technology, he excels in generating genetically matched human embryonic stem cells (hESC) from adult cells. Dr. Chung is the first researcher to successfully create hESC lines via SCNT technology using skin cells from a 35-year-old man and a 75-year-old man in 2004. Until today, Dr. Chung has remained one of very few experts in the world who has high success rates in creating human SCNT cell lines. Recently, Dr. Chung has been exploring the potential clinical benefits of SCNT embryonic stem cells (ESCs) in treating Parkinson’s disease (PD) by injecting ESC differentiated dopamine neurons into the midbrain of monkeys. Dr. Chung holds eight patents for his SCNT technology. His education includes a Ph.D. in Physiology & Cell and Molecular Biology from Colorado State University and a master’s degree in Veterinary Medicine from Chonnam National University in South Korea.

Dr. Cox is a highly respected physician-scientist with his research focus on genome editing, characterization and mammalian applications of CRISPR systems, as well as exploring genome editing tools at a molecular level. Dr. Cox serves as a Scientific Advisor for his expertise in gene editing technology and its cell therapy applications.

Dr. Cox received his bachelor’s degree in Biology with honors at Stanford University. Then he was admitted to the Harvard-MIT MD-PhD Program, which is specifically designed for training the next-generation of premier and diverse physician-scientist leaders. He obtained his Ph.D. in Biology from MIT, during which he discovered a gene-editing technology using the CRISPR-Cas 13 system under the supervision of Professor Zhang Feng, a leading figure in the gene-editing. This RNA editing platform allows efficient and precise RNA correction in mammalian cells, which holds great potential in treating genetic diseases. This novel technology was runner-up for Science’s 2017 Breakthrough of the Year and was selected as one of the top technical advances of 2017 by The Scientist. He has filed more than seven patent applications in United States and around the world.

Dr. Cox received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and was awarded his research and clinical training fellowship in Hematology/Oncology in the Stanford Translational Investigator Program (TIP). At present, he is a physician at Stanford University.