Bernardo Abecasis, PhD student at the Animal Cell Technology Unit (iBET/ITQB NOVA) awarded with the Best Poster Snapshot Presentation

Bernardo Abecasis, PhD student from the Animal Cell Technology Unit (iBET/ITQB NOVA), was awarded with the Best Poster Snapshot Presentation at the Scale-Up and Manufacturing of Cell-based Therapies V held in San Diego, California, USA (15-19 January). The awarded work, authored by Bernardo Abecasis, Tiago Aguiar, Émilie Arnault, Rita Costa, Patricia Gomes-Alves, Anders Aspegren, Margarida Serra, and Paula M. Alves was entitled “Expansion of 3D human induced pluripotent stem cell aggregates in bioreactors: bioprocess intensification and scaling-up approaches” and focused on the development of a scalable and xeno-free bioprocess for the production of clinically relevant numbers of human induced pluripotent stem cells in high quality. This work was developed in close collaboration with Takara Bio Europe AB (Gothenburg, Sweden) under the scope of projects CARDIOSTEM (MITP-TB/ECE/0013/2013) and CardioRegen (HMSP-ICT/0039/2013), funded by Fundação para a ciência e Tecnologia; and by a Grant (registration number 2014-00310) funded by the Swedish innovation agency Vinnova. Scale-up and Manufacturing of Cell-based Therapies V is a conference, organized by Engineering Conferences International (ECI), that addresses the complexity of manufacturing and testing cell-based therapies with tremendous clinical promise for emerging therapies. This conference focuses on the engineering and pragmatic approaches required to develop, refine, characterize, scale-up, automate, validate, and commercialize processes and assays to manufacture, test, store, and distribute cell-based therapies.