Dr. Yuval Rinkevich

Dr. Rinkevich has been working at the cutting edge of our understanding of tissue/organ repair and regeneration for over 20 years. His passion and commitment to understanding healing responses and tissue rejuvenation has led his career track from the point of obtaining his PhD degree from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, where he studied whole body regeneration from single blood vessels in Protochordates.  Dr Rinkevich moved to Stanford University in the US where he investigated pivotal cellular lineages and stem cells in coordinating mammalian tissue repair and regeneration. His work at Stanford projected Dr Rinkevich into the forefront of the tissue repair field, uncovering the role of Engrailed-1 positive cells in the transition from scarless to scar forming tissue responses.

Today Dr Rinkevich is the Director of the Helmholtz Institute of Regenerative Biology and Medicine at the Helmholtz Center, Munich, Germany. His lab fuses a focus on basic biology, continuing to push forward our understanding of tissue/organ repair and regeneration, with a vision to applying these findings to drug development strategies and translation to the clinic. Publication in high impact journals including Nature and Science, numerous patents and supported by prestigious awards such as the ERC Consolidator Grant, highlight the quality of his team’s work. Dr Rinkevich’s latest work describing the role of fascia and transfer of extracellular matrix in tissue scarring and fibrosis in multiple organ systems is reinventing the way we look at tissue repair and regeneration. These findings provide a new perspective on the potential for clinical intervention, opening our minds to a revolution in antifibrotic therapy, a clinical area impacting fields of medicine from oncology to hepatology and pulmonology, and the potential to prevent and potentially resolve fibrotic disease.

Developmental Biology Stem Cell BiologyPathologyTissue Repair and Regeneration Fibrosis ScarringHealing Extra-cellular Matrix