John Wagner, MD

John E. Wagner, MD, is a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of Blood and Marrow Transplant & Cellular Therapy. He is the Founding Director of the new Institute of Cell, Gene and Immunotherapeutics at the University of Minnesota. Co-Director of the Center for Translational Medicine, and holds two endowed chairs—Children's Cancer Research Fund/Hageboeck Family Chair in Childhood Cancer Research, and the University of Minnesota McKnight-Presidential Chair.

Dr. Wagner's research is focused on the development of novel cell therapies for treatment of life threatening diseases. Examples include the development of regulatory T cells that could be used in the treatment of autoimmunity, organ graft rejection as well as graft-versus-host disease, thymic progenitors to repair damaged immune systems, cardiac myoblasts to reverse heart failure, skeletal myoblasts to repair or replace dystrophic muscle fibers in muscular dystrophy, and expansion of the blood-forming stem cell to speed blood and marrow recovery after high doses of chemotherapy and radiation. Dr. Wagner is best known for his pioneering work on the use of placental/cord blood as a source of stem cells for transplantation – a procedure that has now been performed in more than 50,000 patients worldwide.