Congratulations to Ioakeim 'Makis' Ampartzidis, who has been awarded the Pete Coffey Prize for the best submitted abstract to the 2025 UK Stem Cell Network Inaugural Meeting. He is a postdoc in the Hollfelder lab, studying planar cell polarity signalling during early embryotic development.
Makis carried out the work for the submitted paper during his PhD at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute for Child Health, under the supervision of Dr Gabriel Galea and Professor Paolo De Coppi. He developed a reproducible human stem cell model of early neural development using patient-derived iPSCs. The study identified specific defects in neuroepithelial cell shape regulation and differentiation associated with neural tube defects, such as spina bifida. He also showed that non-canonical Wnt/Planar Cell Polarity (PCP) signalling becomes active during neuroepithelial differentiation in vitro, and that patient-specific mutations in the PCP component VANGL2 impair apical constriction in human cells. These findings provide new mechanistic insight into the role of PCP signalling during human neurulation and support future translational applications in the prenatal diagnosis of congenital malformations.
The award honours Pete Coffey, Professor of Visual Psychophysics at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and pioneer of pluripotent stem cell derived cell therapy development, who sadly passed away in June 2025.