It is my pleasure to announce that Dr. Jeffrey R. Millman is being appointed as the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Professor of Endocrinology in the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism & Lipid Research of the Department of Medicine at WashU Medicine.
Dr. Millman is a distinguished scientist who discovered the process for converting human pluripotent stem cells into insulin-producing cells a decade ago and his creative scholarship at WashU has driven refinements leading to the recent first successful treatment of type 1 diabetes with allogeneic stem cell-derived islet-cell therapy.
A native of Oriental, North Carolina, Dr. Millman earned his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from North Carolina State University and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University and was recruited to WashU in 2015.
Dr. Millman has produced an exceptional body of biomedical research in the fields of endocrinology, developmental biology, and biomedical engineering that has received national and international recognition. His contributions have unequivocal scientific impact through discovery and entrepreneurship. His research made stem cell-derived therapy for diabetes a reality through a combination of basic cell biology discoveries and innovative engineering approaches that have scaled cell production to make treatment of people with diabetes feasible. Dr. Millman discovered the bioengineering process to generate functional insulin-producing beta cells from human stem cells and developed a process to scale generation of insulin producing cells by leveraging his discovery that the cytoskeleton of stem cells can be manipulated to control differentiation. He licensed his technologies to two major biotech companies, one of which has participated in FDA-approved clinical trials of cell therapy for diabetes.
Dr. Millman’s work is currently supported by three NIH R01 grants, a Co-I role on two R01 awards, an NIDDK U grant, the Edward Mallinckrodt Foundation, Breakthrough T1D (formerly JDRF), the Dr. Ralph and Marian Falk Medical Research Trust, and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Dr. Millman holds numerous patents dealing with beta cell therapy and several have been licensed to pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Millman is an outstanding teacher of MD PhD students through the MSTP Thread and medical students through the Diabetes KISC. Dr. Millman has served on more than 20 mentoring, exam, and thesis committees. He has mentored numerous undergraduate and graduate students and post doctoral fellows.
Based on current work in the Millman lab developing hypoimmune stem cells for transplantation, we are confident that even more exciting discoveries will emerge from his research that will transform the landscape of diabetes treatment in the future. This approach has the potential to free children with diabetes from insulin injections and provide novel options for the growing populations with insulin deficiency syndromes. In summary, Dr. Jeffrey Millman has generated high impact research accomplishments that have been translated to human therapies, and in the process brought great distinction to WashU.
Please join me in congratulating Dr. Millman in his appointment as the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Professor of Endocrinology in the Department of Medicine.