Jerome Tan received his MEng in Bioengineering at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom, in 2018. Before beginning his PhD in a collaboration between NTU and SMART CAMP, he worked at the Bioprocessing Technology Institute (BTI), A*STAR, as a Research Engineer focusing on projects related to cell therapy manufacturing technologies. Currently, his PhD research is focused on applying various label-free technologies to characterise cell quality attributes of pluripotent stem and neural progenitor cells, for the purpose of detecting variations in cell quality and their impact on subsequent applications.

‍

His current main project is “Label-free characterisation of biophysical properties in iPSC-derived Spinal Cord Progenitor Cells via Magnetic Resonance Relaxometry and Electrical Impedance Measurements to enhance treatment efficacy of spinal cord cell therapy.” The use of iPSC and its derived progenies have suffered from a long history of variability resulting in safety and quality issues. Characterisation of iPSCs and its derived progeny phenotypes have often required the use of labels that resulted in the perturbation of the cell, rendering it unusable for subsequent applications. Label-free technologies aim to understand cell safety and quality parameters by tapping on their intrinsic biophysical properties to provide indication of cell state, quality and functionality as evidenced in a wide variety of studies. In this project,Jerome is optimising the use of various label-free technologies includingMagnetic Resonance Relaxometry and Electrical Impedance to provide information on the differentiation efficiency of iPSCs to Spinal Cord Progenitor Cells.These techniques are believed to have significant impacts on providing safety and quality indicators in a rapid, non-destructive and label-free manner that can be retrofitted into cell therapy manufacturing pipelines.