Conversation with Cenk Sumen - previously working as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Stemson's Therapeutic in the USA; hosted by Tan Lay and Belma Alispahic.
Cenk is an inspiring professional who has worked as a Cell Biochemist in the research labs of MIT and Stanford on antibody engineering and cell culture scale-up. One of his greatest achievements is developing a novel system for deconstructing the molecular events in T-cell antigen recognition while working with multiple sclerosis patients. Furthermore, Cenk has held technical, commercial, and strategy roles at industry pioneers such as STEMCELL Technologies, PerkinElmer, Hitachi, and Thermo Fisher.
At the moment, Cenk is currently working as Scientific Chief Officer at MaxCyte, Inc., focusing to build industry-leading cell engineering systems to enable the regulated delivery of any molecule into any cell. During Cenk previous role as the CTO at Stemson Therapeutics, his mission is to develop new technology that leverages the power of iPSC (induced pluripotent stem cells) to generate new hair follicles. Cenk’s role as a CTO makes him study how to regenerate failing tissues and the chromatin changes that occur with ageing, which is a big focus in longevity research: how to keep human organs and tissue systems from failing? Cenk says, ”Hair today, gone tomorrow!”, a very good model system for how organs fail. This brings us to the main speciality of Stemson’s therapeutics to unpack the biology of that now and understand the genomics behind the hair follicles. He is with us today on AnalysisMode podcast to tell us all about his journey at Stemsons Therapeutics and longevity through hair regeneration.