On June 1, 2019, I became a Professor Emeritus. I remain on the faculty of Scripps Research and will continue to be part of the institute, but moved my entire research program- scientists, equipment, grants, IP, to found Aspen Neuroscience in La Jolla, to translate our research into regenerative medicine for people with currently untreatable neurological disease. Aspen is developing patient-specific neuron replacement therapy for Parkinson's disease.

Genomics and epigenetics of human pluripotent stem cells for ensuring the safety and efficacy of cell therapies. PluriTest and NeuroTest (now called "NeuriTest") machine learning tool for predicting differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells. We were first to develop single cell RNAseq; first to map the methylomes of undifferentiated and differentiated human pluripotent stem cells, first to make pluripotent stem cells from endangered species.

Aspen Neuroscience was named to reflect its mission in regenerative medicine. Ashley Van Zeeland and I were both raised in the Rocky Mountains, where aspens are the first trees to regenerated aftet a forest fire. The company was founded in May, 2018, with me as CSO, Ashley as CEO and my postdoc, Andres Bratt-Leal as Vice President of Research. Kim Kamdar took over as interim CEO when Ashley had an offer she couldn't refuse from Illumina. When we started, we were in a lab leased by Summit for Stem Cell Foundation. Scripps donated all of the equipment I'd acquired over 11 years, and licensed my IP to Summit. My whole lab joined me. With Kim Kamdar, we raised seed funding of $6.5 million within just a few months, from Domain, Section 32, Arch Ventures, Orbimed, an Sam Altman, among others, and moved to the Road to the Cure site where Aspen still has its headquarters. We raised an addition $70 million just as the pandemic was taking hold. Among the people I hired were Jim Mossman for bioinformatics, Thorsten Gorba for process development, and Ed Wirth for clinical. We had a great Pre-IND meeting. Aspen had a setback with the first CEO we hired, but he was replaced by Damien McDevitt, who raised an additional $147.5 million in 2022. The IND for autologous dopamine neuron replacement therapy was filed in 2023, and was cleared by the FDA in August, 2023. The first patient in the Phase I trial was transplanted in April, 2024.

Founded by people with Parkinson's disease to advocate for evidence-based therapies.

I founded this company to derive human embryonic stem cell lines. 9 of the Arcos derivations were on the original Bush list (August, 2001) of hESCs eligible for NIH funding. Arcos merged with Cythera in 2003, with Bresagen soon after, and then with Novocell to form Viacyte. Viacyte has been acquired by Vertex, which is continuing clinical development of cell replacement therapy for Type 1 diabetes.

Gene expression microarrays. Comparative gene expression profiling of Alzheimer disease brain with a mouse model of Alzheimer disease.Dickey CA, Loring JF, et al. Selectively reduced expression of synaptic plasticity-related genes in APP+PS1 transgenic mice. J. Neuroscience. 2003;23:5219. (2002).Bandman O, Coleman RT, Loring JF, Seilhamer JJ, Cocks BG. Complexity of inflammatory responses in endothelial cells and vascular smooth muscle cells determined by microarray analysis. Ann NY Acad Sci 975:77-90. (2002).Loring JF, Wen X, Lee JM, Seilhamer J and Somogyi R. A gene expression profile of Alzheimer's disease. DNA Cell Biol 20:683-95. (2001)Loring JF, Porter JG, Kaser MR, Seilhamer J, Wesselschmidt R. Gene expression profile of embryonic stem cells. Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience 18:81-88. (2001)

Using cutting edge imaging technology to develop a new method for quantifying plaques in Alzheimer's disease brains. Hanzel DK, Trojanowski JQ, Johnston RF and Loring JF. High-throughput quantitative histological analysis by a confocal digital microscanner: Application to Alzheimer’s disease pathology. Nature Biotechnology 17:53-57. (1999)

Mouse ES cells, homologous recombination, gene knockouts, humanized antibodies in mice, transgenic model of Alzheimer disease Choi TK, Hollenbach P, Pearson BE, Ueda RM, Weddell GN, Kurahara C, Woodhouse CS, Kay RM and Loring JF. Transgenic mice containing a human heavy chain immunoglobulin gene fragment cloned in a yeast artificial chromosome. Nature Genetics 4:117-123. (1993)

Developing cell replacement therapy for Parkinson's disease.Publication:Strecker RE, Miao R, Loring, JF. Survival and function of aggregate cultures of rat fetal dopamine neurons grafted in a rat model of Parkinson's disease. Exp. Brain Res.76:315-322.(1989)

Embryology courses, neurobiology courses, research on the neural crest.Example publication:Loring, J. F. & Erickson, C. A. Neural crest cell migratory pathways in the trunk of the chick embryo. Developmental biology 121, 220-236 (1987).