Dr Stephen Minger is the Director of the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory and a Senior Lecturer in the new Wolfson Centre for Age Related Diseases at King's College London. Dr Minger received his PhD in Pathology (Neurosciences) in 1992 from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. From 1992-1994, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego, where he first began to pursue research in neural stem cell biology. In 1995, Dr Minger was appointed an Assistant Professor in Neurology at The University of Kentucky Medical School. He moved his stem cell research programme to Guy's Hospital in 1996 and was appointed a Lecturer in Biomolecular Sciences at King's College London in 1998.
Over the last 15 years, his research group has worked with a wide range of somatic stem cell populations, as well as mouse and human embryonic stem (ES) cells. In 2002, together with Dr Susan Pickering and Professor Peter Braude, Dr Minger was awarded one of the first two licenses granted by the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority for the derivation of human ES cells. His group subsequently generated the first human embryonic stem cell line in the UK and was one of the first groups to deposit this into the UK Stem Cell Bank. They have gone on to generate five new human ES cell lines, including one that encodes the most common genetic mutation resulting in Cystic Fibrosis and another one that contains the Huntington's disease mutation.
In addition to the derivation of human ES cell lines, the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory is focused on the generation of a number of therapeutically relevant human somatic stem cell populations from embryonic stem cells. These include cardiac, vascular, retinal, and neural stem/progenitor cell populations, as well pancreatic -cells and oligodendrocyte progenitors. The Stem Cell Biology research team has established a number of significant collaborations with biological and clinical scientists throughout the UK specifically related to clinical translation of stem cells for a wide variety of human disorders.
Dr Minger is also one of the co-organisers, together with Dr Chris Mason of UCL, of the London Regenerative Medicine Network, a grass-roots, research-led organisation designed to stimulate clinical translation of cell- and gene-based therapies within London. He is also the Senior Editor of Regenerative Medicine, a new journal launched in Jan 2006 by Future Medicines, which recently won the 2006 ALPSP/Charlesworth Award for Best New Journal. Stephen is also the Stem Cell Expert and Member of the UK Gene Therapy Advisory Committee (GTAC) at the Department of Health.