Dr. Kiminobu Sugaya is a Professor and Head of Neuroscience in Burnett School of Biomedical Science, College of Medicine, University of Central Florida (UCF) since 2004. He is a Chair of Multidisciplinary Neuroscience Alliance of UCF. He moved from Japan to Mayo Clinic, US as a postdoc. in 1992 when he was a lecturer in Science University of Tokyo and he was promoted to an associate consultant in 1994. Then he moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago as an assistant professor in 1997 and got promoted to an associate professor in 2002. He has been conducting stem cell researches to treat neurodegenerative diseases by the adult stem cells. He recently received National Honor Plaque of Panama for exceptional contribution to neuroscience based on his study on stem cell therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. His publication regarding improvement of memory in the aged animal by stem cell transplantation was reported Washington Post, BBC, NBC, ABC and other media in all over the world. Dr. Sugaya is also a founder and chair of Progenicyte, which is a biotech company holding his 67 patent licenses, including a revolutionary process of creating pluripotent stem cells from a patient's own cells and a novel pharmaceutical approach to increase endogenous stem cells. He also recently established and SynapCyte, which is a biopharmaceutical company to conduct clinical trials of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease therapies based on his patents.
Neurodegenerative diseases, Cell therapy and Stem cells