Regenerative Medicine

Tan Eng King

MBBS, MRCP (United Kingdom), FRCP (Edinburgh), FAMS (Neurology)

Director of Research
Senior Consultant, Department of Neurology
Professor and Deputy Director, Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders Program, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School
Co-Principal Investigator, Regenerative Medicine

Lim Kah Leong

Ph.D.

Assistant Director of Research
Principal Research Scientist, Department of Research
Associate Professor, Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders Program, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School
Co-Principal Investigator, Regenerative Medicine

Contact Information

National Neuroscience Institute
11 Jalan Tan Tock Seng, Singapore 308433
Tel: (65) 6321 4006 (Tan Eng King) / (65) 6357 7520 (Lim Kah Leong)

The Team

Dr. Zeng Li, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist
Dr. Chai Chou, Ph.D., Associate Research Scientist
Dr. Ma Dongrui, M.D., Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Xiao Bin, M.D., Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow
Ms. Ong Ruyin, B.Sc., Senior Research Assistant

Overview

Several neurological disorders are amenable to neurorestorative therapies via stem cell transplantation. Importantly, the advent of the induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology heralded in a new era that looks set to revolutionize not only regenerative medicine, but also the way we study disease pathogenesis. Being the national neuroscience specialty hospital, NNI is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this technology. Notably, Dr. Tan EK has started the cellular transplantation programme in 1997 with the help of Dr. Olle Lindvall and his team in Lund, Sweden that led to actual fetal mesencephalic transplantation in humans. Dr. Lim KL was part of the NRF-CRP team (2009-2014) that evaluated the potential of iPSCs for neurological disorders and CNS repair. Our platform here represents an integrated regenerative medicine strategy that includes an efficient approach towards deriving patient-specific iPSCs (in a viral-free, feeder-free and xeno-free manner – Lu et al., Biomaterials 35:2816-26), a repository of iPSC for a range of neurological disorders, genome editing tools to correct genetic defects, bioengineering/bioprocessing tools for optimizing the differentiation of these cells into their preferred neuronal fate, and the evaluation of iPSC-derived neurons in transplanted preclinical models.

Our Partners

Professor Ng Huck Hui, Executive Director, Genome Institute of Singapore
Professor Balazs Gulyas, LKC School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University
Dr. Steve Oh, Bioprocessing Technology Institute, A*STAR
Dr. Jonathan Lo, Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, A*STAR