Good morning! Today we are announcing our second UP speaker, a true pioneer in every sense of the word in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. 
Dr. Anthony Atala, M.D. is the Director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and the W.H. Boyce Professor and Chair of the Department of Urology at Wake Forest University. Dr. Atala is a practicing surgeon and a researcher in the area of regenerative medicine. His current work focuses on growing and regenerating new human cells, tissues and organs.
Dr. Atala heads a team of over 270 physicians and researchers. Today, this interdisciplinary team is working to engineer more than 30 different replacement tissues and organs and to develop healing cell therapies -all with the goal to cure, rather than merely treat, disease.
His team engineered the first lab-grown organ – a bladder – implanted into a human, and is currently developing experimental fabrication technology that can “print” human tissue on demand, and could someday solve the organ-donor problem by using living cells to output a transplantable kidney.
We are so excited to bring this incredible innovator to Houston! We can’t wait for October and hope you will join us!