James Chan
Dr. James Chan’s main research interests focus on tolerance induction, autoimmune diseases, gene therapy and stem cell therapy. It is the aim of combining these areas of research that one day the fruits of this research can benefit patients at the clinic. He conducts his research using two autoimmune disease models, namely diabetes and experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), a model for the human disease multiple sclerosis. There are 2 main areas in his research namely 1) using gene therapy technique to genetically modify haematopoietic stem cells to induce immune tolerance for the treatment of autoimmune disease and 2) the use of stem cells from various tissues such as placental stem cells and bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells for the treatment of autoimmune diseases.