Group Leader, Cell and Group Therapy Research
The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute
Royal Children’s Hospital
Flemington Road, Parkville
Melbourne, Victoria 3052 Australia

Panos Ioannou received both his B.Sc. and his Ph.D. in biochemistry from University College, London, with a focus on the molecular mechanisms of memory laydown. His fascination with the mechanism of DNA replication also led him to publish a model for this mechanism in Nature while still a student. Dr. Ioannou set up and ran for almost 15 years the Prenatal Diagnosis for Thalassaemia in Cyprus, followed by the setting up of the Department of Molecular Genetics in the Cyprus Institute of Neurology and Genetics. He has held fellowships from various organizations, including WHO and UNESCO. In the course of a UNESCO fellowship in 1992 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he created the first human PAC genomic library, which has been used extensively for the sequencing of the human genome. Since 1997 Dr. Ioannou has moved to the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Melbourne, Australia, where he leads the Cell and Gene Therapy (CAGT) Research Group. He is concentrating on the development of novel therapies with intact genomic loci for haematological and neurological disorders, while similar approaches may have major implications in biotechnology and the biological emancipation of the human species.