Dr. Thomas E. Serena MD FACS FACHM MAPWCA, Founder and Medical Director of The SerenaGroup®, a family of wound, hyperbaric and research companies, is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of The College of William and Mary and Penn State Medical School. He completed his residency in Surgery at The Milton S. Hershey Medical Center with additional year of training in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Southern Illinois University. To date he has opened and operates wound care centers across the United Sates and globally. Dr. Serena has been the lead or Principal investigator in over 100 clinical trials, including gene therapy for critical limb ischemia, antimicrobial dressings, growth factors, topical and parenteral antibiotics and CTP therapy. He founded the first wound healing cooperative research group that produced more than 12 manuscripts in 2016 alone. In 2011 he developed a diagnostic technique that now bears his name (The Serena Technique©). He holds numerous patents on wound care devices and dressings. He is recognized internationally as an expert in the field of wound healing: He has more than 200 published papers and has given more than 1000 invited lectures throughout the world. He has published three medical textbooks and authored numerous book chapters. He has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Wound Healing Society and served two terms on the board of the Association for the Advancement of Wound Care (AAWC) and is now the President. He has also been Vice-President of the American College of Hyperbaric Medicine and President of the American Professional Wound Care Association. Dr. Serena has done extensive medical relief work with Health Volunteers Overseas and served as chairman of the AAWC Global Volunteers/HVO Steering Committee until 2016. In 2016 in partnership with HEAL Foundation he opened a wound clinic in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. Outside of wound healing, he consulted for the government of Rwanda on AIDS prevention research.

wound and hyperbaric research

Dr Ryan Moseley graduated from Swansea University with a BSc (Honours) Degree in Biochemistry. Later, he obtained his PhD from the School of Dentistry, University of Wales College of Medicine, examining the role of oxidative stress in periodontal disease. Dr Moseley continues his research at Cardiff University, where he is currently a Reader in Tissue Repair and Director of the CITER MSc Programme in Tissue Engineering. Dr. Moseley’s research focusses on the mechanisms underlying dermal and oral wound healing during health and disease; and the development of stem cell-, biomaterial- and pharmaceutical-based strategies to address impaired healing in these tissues.

Dermal, oral wound healing, stem cell-, biomaterial

After receiving his college education in Biology Major from Xinjiang University, People’s Republic of China, Dr. Li came to the US in 1985. He received MS degree in 1988 and PhD degree in 1991 from the Department of Developmental Biology and Cancer at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York City. Following a two-year post-doctoral/instructor fellowship with Dr. Joseph Schlessinger (Professor and Chairman, currently at Yale University Medical Center), he joined the faculty of the Ben May Institute for Cancer Research at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1993 as an Assistant Professor. He was recruited to University of Southern California (USC) Keck School of Medicine in 1999 and rose to full professor in 2006. He is currently a Professor and Director of the GMCB Graduate Program at USC Keck School of Medicine. His research interest focuses wound healing and cancer cell invasion. His laboratory is the first to identify the important role for the SECRETED form of heat shock protein-90 (Hsp90) in skin wound healing. He is the principle author of more than 80 peer-reviews publications in first-rate biomedical journals.

wound healing and cancer cell invasion

Jöns Hilborn is since 2001 the head of the Polymer Chemistry program at the Department of Materials Chemistry, Uppsala University in Sweden. He has extensive management experience from life science industry and co-ordination of European projects. His research interests are in the design, synthesis and preparation of polymers and specifically materials for tissue scaffolds and as delivery vehicles. Current focus is on injectable in-vivo gel forming matrices that acts on endogenous cells to regenerate and the development of RNAi to allow translation to therapies. Chemistry, biology, engineering is combined with medicine to bring basic research findings from the lab bench to the clinic and commercial applications. He served as president of “Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society” (TERMIS), which he was a part of creating. He currently serves as ERC panel chair, board member of the UK medical research council in regenerative medicine, associate editor, international advisor and the editorial board for a number of journals. He received his PhD from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, which was followed by seven years in industry before he joined the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Switzerland for eight years. He is a frequently invited speaker at international events and has published 200 scientific papers (h=46), 26 patent applications and has started 7 companies.

Design, synthesis and preparation of polymers and specifically materials for tissue scaffolds and as delivery vehicles

Dr Vickie R. Driver is a Fellow at the American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons, licensed in Ma and RI and is board certified in foot surgery by the American Board of Podiatric Surgery. She has recently been nominated as Fellow, Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons-Glasgow, PM. Her career has a special emphasis on wound healing and limb preservation and she is an outspoken ambassador for progressive change in this field. Dr. Driver is a Professor of Surgery in the Department of Orthopedics at Brown University (Clinical). She has recently completed her tenure as president for the Advancement of Wound Care Association (AAWC), and has served for 9 years on the Board of Directors. She also proudly serves as a member of the Wound Healing Society (WHS) Board of Directors- member at large and chair-Industry relations and as member Board of Directors for the Critical Limb Ischemia (CLI) Global Society and chair wound healing committee. She has successfully chaired an initiative to expand the wound healing clinical endpoints considered by FDA. She proposed a combined effort between the WHS and AAWC to develop the Wound-care Experts/FDA-Clinical Endpoints Project [WEF-CEP] to strategically identify clinically meaningful, evidence-based and patient-centered wound care endpoints that are relevant for clinical research and trials. The goal is to collaboratively work with the FDA to expand the list of acceptable primary endpoints, recognizing that new and innovative treatments, devices and drugs may not have complete healing as the focus. Furthermore, validated endpoints other than complete healing will promote improved clinical trial design and will reduce the time for discoveries to reach our patients. Over the past three years, through ongoing interaction with the FDA InterCenter Wound Healing Work Group [ICWHWG], the WEF-CEP team has conducted a wide reaching Clinician Survey with 628 participating wound care experts, completed an extensive literature review for 28 wound care endpoints using the FDA criteria for a validated endpoint, published the clinical survey results in WRR, is in process to publish the research phase results and is currently conducting a Patient Survey to augment the findings of the Clinician Survey. Formal collaboration with the FDA established to execute on the WEF CEP work is on-going. As principle investigator, she has served on and initiated more than 70 important multi-center randomized clinical trials, as well as developed and supervised multiple research fellowship training programs. She has co-authored over 100 publications and abstracts. Dr. Driver is Director, Translational Medicine Wound Healing at Novartis Institute for BioMedical Research. She is dedicated to making a scientific contribution to both the understanding of the natural history of disease and the discovery of new therapies and diagnostics to advance the treatment of patients who suffer with wounds and are at risk of limb loss. .

wound healing and limb preservation

Ms. Kirkland-Walsh received her NP degree as a Family/Geriatric Nurse Practitioner from the University of California, Davis, her BSN and MSN degrees from Cal State, Sacramento, and a WOCN certification from the University of Washington, Seattle. She has served as Nurse Manager in the Medical Surgical Unit / Geriatrics and as Diabetes Educator and Clinical Trials Nurse in Waterford, Ireland, as a Palliative Care Nurse at Kaiser, and as Cardiology Nurse Practitioner at UCDMC. She Completed her PhD in Nursing at the University of California San Francisco. Since 2004, Ms. Kirkland-Walsh has been a board member for the Sacramento Community Clinics Consortium. She presently serves as an Urgent Care Nurse Practitioner at Kaiser, as Assistant Medical Director at The Effort Indigent Health Clinic, and as Wound Care Nurse Practitioner at University of California, Davis Health System in Sacramento, CA. In the latter role, she leads a multidisciplinary team that focuses on the prevention and treatment of chronic wounds. In addition to these various positions, Ms. Kirkland-Walsh has worked with geriatric patients in Ireland, Great Britain, and, most recently, in Haiti where she did disaster relief work as a volunteer for Medishare and served as Chief Medical Officer at the Bernard Mevs Hospital, the only acute care hospital in Haiti. She also comes with prior teaching experience, serving as clinical faculty for Nurse Practitioner programs at University of California, Davis, University of California, San Francisco, Sonoma State, University of Phoenix, and Samuel Merritt. Her proposed area of research focuses on perfusion related pressure ulcers and the comparison on hospital acquired pressure ulcers to community acquired pressure ulcers.

Ulcers, Wound Care,Skin

Naiem Moiemen, MB BS, MSc, FRCS (Plast) is an Honorary Professor at the University of Birmingham and a consultant plastic and burns surgeon at University Hospital Birmingham. He is Director of the Scar Free Foundation Centre for Burn Research in Birmingham He is the Clinical Lead of the Midland Burns Care Network, serving a population of 10 million. Naiem is Immediate Past President of European Burn Association Executive, President-Elect of the International Association of Burn Injury (ISBI) and past Chairman of the British Burn Association (BBA). He is supervising 3 PhD students and current chief investigator of 4 current multi-centre burns clinical trials: NIHR-HTA pressure garment pilot efficacy multi-centre trial, and the SIFTI trial investigating the acute response to burn injury and HESTIA trial investigating gut translocation following thermal injury. He is also PI on the Wellcome-NIHR HICF to develop an anti-scarring wound dressing, and recently £4.5m Libor Grant fund to establish a scar and wound healing research centre in Birmingham. He has published more than 90 papers in peer review journals and book chapters. He is a senior editor of BURNS journal and deputy editor of Journal of Burn and Trauma.

Scars, Wound Healing, Burns, Burn Injury