Clive Svendsen, PhD

Dr. Svendsen is Executive Director of the Regenerative Medicine Institute at Cedars-Sinai and PI of a large lab. His work focuses on using stem cells to model and treat neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Huntington’s disease, spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a severe childhood onset psychomotor disorder (AHDS) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). His lab has extensively used iPSCs to model disease, generating the first-ever iPSC-based model of a neurodegenerative disease to show a phenotype for patients with SMA. More recently, he has used iPSCs from PD patients to derive dopamine neurons, which revealed a molecular signature for disease prediction and novel therapeutics. He is also the Sponsor of several Phase 1/2a clinical trials; with one trial delivering human neural progenitor cells as a therapy for Retinitis Pigmentosa, and two trials delivering a combined gene and cell therapy to either the spinal cord or motor cortex of ALS patients.