CEO Today USA Awards

NEW JERSEY 60 CEO Today USAAwards 2018 Robert (Bob) Hariri MD, PhD Founder, Chairman & CEO of Celularity It takes a rare, diverse combination of skills to be operating at ‘the edge of the envelope’ in any transformational technology. In the early days of the space program, they said the men for the job had to possess the ‘right stuff’. Celularity, an exciting new global leader in cellular and regenerative medicine is driven by its own ‘right stuff’ chief executive officer and CEO Today Award Winner, and is poised to disrupt the way many cancers, degenerative diseases, and even the ravages of aging will be treated. What inspired you to found Celularity Inc.? Early in my professional career and throughout my academic and surgical training, and exposure to military medicine, my focus has always been on the treatment of the most serious, life-threatening conditions such as head and spinal cord injuries. As a neurosurgical faculty surgeon and scientist at Cornell University, working to achieve a better understanding of how to manage and treat severe neurological injuries, regenerative approaches were in their infancy. I viewed this technology as a potential transformative platform to repair what was always considered the unrepairable. For many years, we always assumed that the brain and the heart were two organs that did not recover after sustaining a serious injury such as a stroke or heart attack. When stem cells first emerged as a scientific platform during this time, it excited me, because I saw a tremendous opportunity to use those cells to restore the regenerative processes necessary to stimulate recovery and return patients to a pre-injury state of function, and that is what inspired me to build a business capable of delivering this technology to medicine. Has it achieved what you anticipated? I’m very proud of what we’re building at Celularity. We have built a world-class cellular medicine company on a platform technology we invented harnessing the biologic power and versatility of placenta-derived cells. First, we were the team that discovered that a product of a full-term healthy pregnancy and the material that gets discarded by doctors—the placenta—is Q Q www.celularity.com