James Thomson
The Power List 2020 – Advanced Medicine
Investigator, Regenerative Biology at the Morgridge Institute for Research
James Thomson is a developmental biologist well known for his pioneering work isolating and culturing human embryonic stem cells in 1998, and developing human pluripotent stem cells from adult skin cells in 2007. He co-founded Cellular Dynamics International (now part of Fujifilm) in 2004 to commercialize human-induced pluripotent stem cells for drug discovery and toxicity testing. In 2019, the Thomson Lab at Morgridge found a better way to grow smooth muscle cells from pluripotent stem cells.
