Dr. Tomáš Koblas' research interests are in the area of rodent and human islet isolation and transplantation and differentiation of pancreatic beta-cells. He helped to successfully establish a program for clinical human islet transplantation. Recently he published a study where he reports that pancreatic cells of exocrine origin can be transdifferentiated into insulin-producing cells using synthetic mRNAs (intracellular delivery) encoding key transcription regulators of ?-cell differentiation. In his talk he will go into more detail about his diabetes research and elaborate on this promising approach for cell-based diabetes therapy.

Dr. Koblas is a research scientist at the Clinical Islet laboratory of the Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine (IKEM). He graduated from Charles University Prague with a B.S. in clinical and toxicological analysis. In 2003 he received his master’s degree in biochemistry at Charles University Prague and in 2011 he received his PhD with his thesis on "Differentiation of adult stem cells into insulin-producing beta cells" at the same department. Tomáš Koblas won the Novartis Discovery Award in 2016.

Information about his publications can be found at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?cmd=search&term=koblas+t%5Bau%5D