Valeria Chichagova

Valeria’s career has focused on harnessing the potential of pluripotent stem cells in the study of human development and disease, and in drug discovery. After graduating from the University of Edinburgh with a Masters in Integrative Neuroscience she moved to Newcastle University to pursue a PhD studying a rare retinal disease using patient-derived iPSCs as a model. She then gained experience as an analyst in health economics, as a researcher at the BBC, and also worked as a postdoc investigating retinal disease mechanisms using retinal organoids.

An exciting opportunity came up to join Newcells to set up the retinal platform, and the last few years have been full of challenges and fun! She is now the Associate Director of iPSC Technology and Head of Retina at Newcells leading the development and commercialization of the Newcells retinal platform. Her experience ranges from scaling up and qualifying production methods to using in vitro retinal models for a range of applications including gene therapy and disease modelling.