Talk Title: Beyond Immunosuppression: The promise of MSCs for Lupus

Professor Dominique Farge is full time Professor of Internal Medicine and Hospital Practitioner at St-Louis APHP University Hospital, Paris-Cite University France since 1995 and adjunct Professor at McGill University, Canada since 2017. She has worked for the past 30 years in hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) and other immune cell therapies, notably mesenchymal stroma cell (MSC) and CART Cell, for patients with autoimmune diseases (AD) at the French and European levels and also in Canada nad worldwide. Her current activities are focused on clinical and translational research programs and education in stem cell therapies (HSCT,MSC, CARTs) for AD patients. As former Chair of the Auto-immune Diseases (AD) Working Party of the European Bone Marrow Transplant Association (ADWP EBMT), she fostered the cooperation among transplant and AD specialists to initiate and promote EBMT retrospective registry studies and prospective studies using HSCT in SSc, SLE, MS and Crohn’s disease.

She was and is involved and coordinated several European and International guidelines for the use of HSCT and innovative therapies (MSC and CART) in AD. She founded the French MATHEC network dedicated to stem cell therapy in auto-immune diseases, labelled and funded by the French Health Ministry as a Center of Reference for Rare Autoimmune Diseases and stem cell therapies (www.mathec.com). Since 2017, she is active member the International Society of Cell Therapy (elected member to the ISCT Board of Directors 2019-21; Regional Vice-President elect Europe 2023-2025;Regional Vice-President Europe 2025-2027;) with major focus on contributing to develop ISCT visibility on clinical trials and by developing online education globally in order to facilitate knowledge transfer based on the three pillars from the ISCT (www.isctglobal.org) She is presently PI or COPI of 3 ongoing clinical phase I-II trials using AT-MSC or UC-MSC in Scleroderma and CoVID patients.

She is author or coauthor of 550 peer-reviewed articles (H-Index 85) and Co-Editor of the book – Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapies for Autoimmune Diseases, Book 651 pages, edited by Burt R.K, Farge D., Ruiz M., Saccardi R., Snowden JAD, First Edition published 2022, Taylor & Francis Group LLC, CRC Press