Thank you & Success: 2015 WAFSF Completed

On November 12 and 13, 2015, the Alliance Forum Foundation, together with the Government of Japan, successfully held the 2015 World Alliance Forum in San Francisco (WAFSF). Entitled, “Regenerative Medicine: Let’s Talk Business,” the third annual conference on stem cell technologies and regenerative medicine focused on the commercialization and industrialization. Over 300 attendees representing small and large businesses, research institutes and hospitals, governments and agencies, nonprofits, and the media from the US, Japan, and beyond participated in exciting discussions at 2015 WAFSF.

The highlights of the conference include the keynote speech by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, the Nobel laureate who discovered iPS cells. Dr. Yamanaka shared exciting developments in the clinical translation of iPS cells as well as in infrastructure building around the technology, including cultivating human resources and iPS cell banking.

The Forum also showed an increasing interest and entry of established companies – including many large pharmaceutical and biotech players – into the regenerative medicine field. Sanofi, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Celgene, GE, Fujifilm, and Hitachi were among the speakers and many more in attendance. The executives of these companies strongly emphasized the high potential of the field and are seeing huge opportunities both in the development of regenerative therapeutics, and enabling technologies or services.

Japan’s Regulatory changes allowing regenerative medicine another area of high interest and, the new framework is also stimulating partnership activities between regenerative medicine businesses in the US and other countries and Japanese companies. Fujifilm and Cellular Dynamics International returned to the Forum and discussed their partnership in detail.

The Alliance Forum Foundation plans to hold another forum in November, 2016. Please stay updated by visiting the WAFSF website at www.wafsf.org.