The Digest | New Jersey Magazine
Issue link: https://magazines.vuenj.com/i/1197024
Leading physician and researcher in the field of placental cell therapy, Dr. Robert Hariri, is confident that stem cells from the placental organ are the key to ensuring better health and longevity for our children. "Cellular medicine, regenerative medicine, and the future for these technologies has never been brighter and more exciting... Stem cells from the placenta and cord blood have been used to treat thousands of patients and have been life-saving in virtually all of those instances," he attests. I was fortunate enough to spend some time speaking with Dr. Hariri about his breakthrough work in stem cell research and about Celularity, the New Jersey-based cell therapeutics company in Warren, New Jersey, of which he is both the CEO and founder. In our interview, he provides thorough answers to questions new and expectant parents may have about the benefits of cell therapy and how to go about banking some of these potentially life-saving natural materials. With all of your diverse interests and talents, what drove you to devote your career to cell therapy? I started as a neurosurgeon specializing in head and spinal cord injuries, and back in the '80s and '90s those were pretty devastating injuries with generally poor prognoses, where patients suffered a neurologic deficit that was oen irreparable. When stem cells first emerged as a therapeutic or a scientific platform, I was intrigued by the possibility that the cells could restore certain regenerative activities that could repair the brain and spinal cord and return function in that limited recovery environment. I became very interested in how this technology would ever find its way to becoming a scalable, therapeutic [process] that could impact lots of lives, not just a limited number of lives. When I was a surgeon at Cornell and my daughter was in utero, I looked at the ultrasound of my unborn child. For the first time it dawned on me that the placenta—the organ that I had thought was a vascular interface between the mother and the developing fetus—was actually a very sizeable organ that probably played a deeper role than just a vascular connection. Putting two and two together, I theorized that the placenta played a role in the propagation and differentiation of stem cells as the fetus was developing, and if that was the case, at the end of a pregnancy, that waste product might be a good place to look for high-quality stem cells to turn into therapeutic products. V U E N J . C O M 143