Dr. Aline M. Betancourt – is a recognized expert in the field of stem cells, cancer, and stem cell-based therapies. She has greatly contributed to the understanding of many aspects of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) over the last two decades.
Her laboratory was the first to show that Toll-like receptors (TLRs) on MSCs affects their stress responses and immune modulation. She was also first to describe paradigm-shifting evidence that MSCs can be induced into both the accepted immunosuppressive MSC2 phenotype and a new pro-inflammatory MSC1 phenotype. This patented work led to her first FDA pre-IND review and pre-clinical validation in 7 disease models. This technology was sold in 2018. She recently started VITAbolus to solve some of the hurdles in the cell-based therapy industry. VITAbolus aims to democratize cell therapy-giving everyone access to it by making an inexpensive and readily available stem cell pill.
Dr. Betancourt has been the principal investigator on numerous NIH and DOD funded projects. She is a scientific advisory board member for CARB-X (Boston Univ). She is an editorial board member for World Journal of Stem Cells, Journal of Stem Cell and Therapy, and the Journal on Bioinformatics and Biotechnology.
She reviews over 25 manuscripts per year and has served in various national and international granting agency review panels. She has authored numerous peer-
reviewed papers and book chapters in the field of stem cell and cancer biology and as a result is consistently nominated by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) for their minority award.
Dr. Betancourt received her PhD degree from Georgetown Univ. Her postdoctoral training in cancer research began at the NIH-NCI. She has been a faculty member of Tulane University School of Medicine since 1994, as an Adjunct Associate Professor since 2014.
