Jeffrey Millman, PhD

Jeffrey Millman, PhD, is professor of medicine and biomedical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, where he leads the Millman Laboratory. He earned a chemical engineering PhD from MIT and completed postdoctoral work with Doug Melton at Harvard. His group developed a six-step protocol that differentiates human pluripotent stem cells into glucose-responsive beta cells, producing up to half a billion cells per batch in scalable suspension culture. These cells show first and second phase insulin secretion approaching that of primary islets, and they rapidly reverse hyperglycemia when transplanted into diabetic mice. He also generated functional beta cells from induced pluripotent stem cells of patients with type 1 diabetes, work reported in Nature Communications in 2016. That result pointed toward patient-specific cell replacement therapy.

Affiliation

Investigator, Washington University

Location

St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.