Jihwan Song, D Phil

Hometown
Busan, Korea

Current Residence
Seoul, Korea

Graduate Degree
D Phil

Current Position
Professor, Department of Biomedical Science, CHA University, Korea President, Korean Society for Stem Cell Research (KSSCR) Director, Global Alliance for iPSC Therapies (GAiT) Founder & CEO, iPS Bio, Inc.

What is the current focus of your research, and what do you find most rewarding about your work?

The current focus of my research is developing stem cell therapies for intractable neurological and neurodegenerative diseases, such as stroke, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s diseases using GMP-grade neural cells differentiated from HLA-homozygous iPSC lines that my group has established recently. I am also interested in utilizing patient-specific iPSC lines for disease modeling and drug discovery in Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s diseases. Finding new possibilities for clinical application from our research and discovering new drugs are the most rewarding aspects of my work.  

What led you to become a scientist and to stem cell research?

I was trained as a developmental biologist and studied the role of FGFs during early Xenopus development under the supervision of Prof. Jonathan Slack at Oxford University, UK for my PhD. Afterwards, I became interested in the role of activin receptor signaling during mouse development in Prof. En Li’s lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, USA. During this period, I gained practical knowledge on mouse knockouts and embryonic stem cell culture, which provided the basis for my later work on pluripotent stem cells when I returned to Korea in 2000.