Alex Kharazi

Dr. Kharazi is a physician by training. He finished Medical School in 1978 in Kiev, Ukraine, where he earned his medical degree in internal medicine and pathology. From 1978 to 1981, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Kiev Institute of Gerontology. Dr. Kharazi received extensive training in cell biology and immunology, including tissue culture and subsequently earned his PhD in immunology. He studied age-related pathological changes of the immune system in mice and humans and his research interests included the possibility of restoring immunity in aged mice using stem cells from young adult mice. Dr. Kharazi was one of the first to discover the inhibitory effects of old thymus in mice and later published on this subject.

In 1989 Alex was invited to work as a research fellow in the department of Pathology at the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology in Japan. There, he studied early progenitors for adult thymic epithelial cells and successfully established adult thymic epithelial cell lines. He received extensive training in immuno-cytology and flow cytometry.

In 1991 Dr. Kharazi was invited to UCLA to serve as Chief Pathologist of an EPA-controlled study on the effects of magnetic fields on the incidence of lymphoma in mice. While at UCLA, he received extensive training in U.S. Good Laboratory Practices and regulatory affairs. The results of the study were reported to the United States Congress. From 1998 through 2006, Dr. Kharazi served as Chief Scientist of the Immunotherapy laboratory at St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles, California. There, his research interests focused on cancer treatment using tumor vaccines, which were designed and manufactured to activate a patient’s own immune system. He successfully designed, prepared, and patented a breast cancer vaccine using genetic engineering. He also conducted scientific work on the role that dendritic cells play in the generation of anti-tumor immune response. Dr. Kharazi has hands-on experience in conducting FDA approved clinical trials. In 2006, Dr. Kharazi was invited to head stem cell research and manufacturing at Stemedica Cell Technologies in San Diego, where he established product development and GMP compliant manufacturing of human mesenchymal and neural stem cells, which allowed Stemedica to conduct phase I/II FDA approved trials in several medical applications.

Dr. Kharazi has published over 30 research articles in scientific journals and has contributed to several chapters in scholarly books. He has presented his data at numerous national and international scientific meetings. He is an active member of many distinguished societies such as The American Association for Cancer Research. In addition, he served as a consultant to several research companies and has also been a faculty member at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Dr. Kharazi is a named inventor of 8 US patents and various foreign patents. He is an author of numerous publications and an invited speaker/chairman on a number of stem cell meetings.