Nidheesh Dadheech

I am a developmental stem cell biologist and bioprocess engineering scientist with over two decades of experience on generating islets and β-cells from stem cells, and six years of process development and manufacturing for islet cell therapy products. At Upstate I direct the Dadheech Stem Cell Islet Bioengineering Laboratory and lead the translational biomedical cell therapy program. I serve as a Director for the Upstate Diabetes Cure Initiative, SUNY Centre for Advanced Cell Therapy and a translational biomedical cell therapy program, with an aim for advancing autologous islet manufacturing and bringing the gap for translating SC-islets into clinical use in Central New York and the United States. Before joining SUNY Upstate I served as Senior Research Lead for Cell Therapy and Process Development at the Clinical Islet Transplant Program, University of Alberta, with Dr. James Shapiro, founder of the Edmonton Protocol for islet transplantation, where I directed his preGMP laboratory and the SC-islet scale up production to support a clinical trial program. My work there established the full-suspension SC-islet generation protocol in Vertical-Wheel platform, and published the work in npj Regenerative Medicine, 2025,We demonstrated that scalable suspension differentiation of iPSCs yields enhanced endocrine cell composition, optimal secretion capacity and diabetes-reversal potential from autologous SC-islets at scale.