Dr. Ali Ertürk
//Living for 200 years: How 3D-bioprinted organs stop aging process
Dr. Ertürk is from Turkey. He received his bachelor's degree in 2003 from Bilkent University in Ankara (Turkey). He did his Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, where he worked on to induce in the spinal cord injury. In 2009, he moved to San Francisco for postdoctoral studies at Genentech, where he worked on to understand and treat traumatic brain. During 5 years at Genetnech, which is considered the best biotechnology company in the world, he learnt how to take basic science into application for drug development and disease treatment. In addition, he conceived Genentech's unique environment with a well-known culture to increase the employee satisfaction and happiness, which naturally promotes flourishment of great basic and translational research atmosphere (his blog post on the topic: alierturk.blogspot.com/2014/06/in-business-for-life.html). During his early scientific career, he developed numerous new technologies to able to image cellular details of organs, the most prominently a technology named DISCO clearing, which make rodent tissues and organs transparent for detailed laser scanning microscopy.
In 2015, he established a multinational and multidisciplinary research-team at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, which consists of biologists, clinicians, engineers, and computer scientists to bring basic research into real life application. Recently, he further perfected the transparency technology to apply it on adult human organs (on which he filed a patent). This work took worldwide a big attention already as a preprint publication at BioRxiv (ranked #3 in more than 4000 manuscripts) and highlighted by news agencies including Reuters, Telegram, Focus magazine, Daily Mail, CNBC, RTL, Sat1, DW and Süddeutsche Zeitung. This new technology allows generation of single cell maps of human organs, the most detailed "blueprints" obtained so far. He plans to use these detailed maps to generate functional organ replicates by 3D-bioprintng in the near future.
He recently accepted a prestigious directorship offer from Helmholtz Munich to carry out the vision of 3D-bioprinted human organ generation. Dr. Ertürk has also great interest to make a start up on this concept, to pursue his dream of creating a Genentech environment in Germany with its top quality culture, science and productivity.