John Engelhardt

Dr John Engelhardt is the director at the University of Iowa Center for Gene Therapy of Cystic Fibrosis as well as the head of the department of Anatomy and Cell Biology. He is a well known scientist who created the first cloned ferret and has made huge strides in finding the cure for Cystic Fibrosis.

Dr. Engelhardt got his undergraduate degree in biochemistry at Iowa State University in 1985. He then went on to get his doctorate in human genetics from Johns Hopkins University in 1990.

Dr. Engelhardt is most widely known for his creation of new animal models for the study of cystic fibrosis. In the 1990s he developed the human tracheal xenograft models that allowed study of humanized airways on denuded rat tracheal scaffolds. However, he soon found that there were major limitation of mouse models to study CF. He later found that the ferrets have a much better model for lung disease and in 2006 his laboratory became the first in the world to clone ferrets. Dr. Engelhardt's research has been geared towards finding gene therapies for cystic fibrosis. Specifically, he focuses on:

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