This is an in-person event, taking place in the Polani seminar room, CGTRM, 8th floor, Tower Wing, Guys Hospital. The speaker will be attending in-person, so please come along to the talk if you're available. No registration is required and everyone (internal or external to King's) is welcome!

Make sure you take advantage of this opportunity by attending as the talk won't be recorded.  

This is an in-person event only

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"Personalised Oesophageal Tissue Engineering: From Bench to Large Animal Breakthroughs"

Speaker: Dr Marco Pellegrini (UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health)

Biography: Dr Marco Pellegrini is a Research Associate and NIHR GOSH BRC Fellow at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health. His work spans stem cell biology, molecular biology, and translational tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. He leads the NIHR GOSH BRC iPSC Reprogramming Resource, overseeing the generation of iPSCs from patients with rare genetic diseases to support paediatric research.

Dr Pellegrini earned his PhD in Biology Applied to Human Health from the University of Roma Tre, followed by postdoctoral training at the University of Padua in Prof Martello’s group. There, he contributed to pioneering methods for generating human naïve iPSCs in microfluidic systems and to defining the role of the novel pluripotency regulator ZNF398.

At UCL, in Prof Paolo De Coppi’s group, his research focuses on tissue-engineered organs for paediatric congenital malformations, including oesophageal atresia. He led the multidisciplinary team that achieved the first functional integration of a circumferential tissue-engineered oesophagus in a large-animal model. This work, published in Nature Biotechnology, demonstrated that autologous engineered grafts can support contractile muscle regeneration and restore peristalsis.