James Eliason is Founder, President and Chief Scientific Officer for the stem cell technology company, MitoStem. He is also Director of the Stem Cell Commercialization Center locate at TechTown, the technology business incubator of Wayne State University. He is also adjunct faculty at Wayne State University School of Medicine and the Karmanos Cancer Institute. From 2000 until 2008, he was Chief Scientific Officer of Asterand, the human tissue research services company that he helped to develop. Dr. Eliason received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Chicago in the laboratory where erythropoietin was purified. Following postdoctoral training in England and the Netherlands, he worked at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research in Lausanne. He then worked for Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel, Switzerland and was responsible for transferring the ongoing preclinical oncology research projects from Basel to the Nippon Roche Research Center in Kamakura, Japan. He returned to Detroit in 1995 to join the Karmanos Cancer Institute where he was working in the hospital where he had been born.