TERMIS brings its Asia-Pacific conference to New Zealand for the first time: Te Pae Christchurch, 27-30 October

The Tissue Engineering & Regenerative Medicine International Society – Asia Pacific Chapter Conference (TERMIS-AP2026) will be held from 27 to 30 October 2026 at the Te Pae Christchurch Convention Centre, 188 Oxford Terrace in the Christchurch central city. The conference website states plainly that this is the first TERMIS conference to be held in Aotearoa New Zealand, and that it will bring together researchers, clinicians, industry figures and policymakers from across the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. The stated theme is "Converging Cultures and Strategies in Translational Regenerative Medicine".

Who runs it

TERMIS is the international learned society for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, publisher of the Tissue Engineering journal and organiser of a World Congress plus three regional chapter conferences. Its Asia-Pacific chapter, according to termis.org, was established in July 2005 at the Catholic University of Korea's medical school in Seoul, with founding representatives drawn from Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Australia, Malaysia and China. The chapter conference rotates around the region; TERMIS has separately solicited proposals for the 2028 AP edition, and the society's chapter-conferences page shows the Christchurch meeting sitting in a 2026 cycle alongside TERMIS-EU in Palma de Mallorca in April and TERMIS-AM in New Orleans in November.

TERMIS lists the conference chairs as Prof Andrea O'Connor of the University of Melbourne and Prof Tim Woodfield of the University of Otago, with programme chairs Prof Guoping Chen and A/Prof Jelena Rnjak-Kovacina. The event website carries welcome messages from both co-chairs. The conference site also displays TERMIS alongside co-host and partner marks including the Australasian society and the University of Otago, and names ChristchurchNZ among its partners. Day-to-day management sits with Christchurch-based professional conference organiser Conference Innovators, listed as the contact on the sponsorship page, with registration handled through an EventsAir portal.

Who it's for

This is a working scientific conference rather than a trade show. The published themes-and-symposia list runs to 27 numbered themes and roughly 70 accepted symposia, covering cancer modelling, neural repair, musculoskeletal and orthopaedic regeneration, organoids and organ-on-chip systems, stem cells, extracellular vesicles, biofabrication and bioprinting, cardiac and vascular engineering, dental and maxillofacial regeneration, gene therapy and genome editing, mechanobiology, wound healing, smart biomaterials, GMP and regulatory science, women's health, bioelectronics, ophthalmic tissue engineering and space biology. Dedicated streams cover industry engagement and commercialisation, research integrity, and early-career development through the society's student and young investigator section.

Three plenary speakers are named on the site: Prof Zhen Gu of Zhejiang University, director of the National Key Laboratory of Advanced Drug Delivery and Release Systems; Prof Tony Weiss of the University of Sydney, a former TERMIS president and former chair of TERMIS Asia Pacific; and Prof Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, Bren Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at Caltech. The draft programme, published as of 9 July 2026 and given in New Zealand Daylight Time, opens with registration from 9:00am on Tuesday 27 October. The Nanowerk listing that first surfaced the event records it as an in-person conference accepting oral and poster submissions, with a poster session, an industry session and an industry exhibition.

The venue

Te Pae Christchurch opened in 2022 and is described by its operator as accommodating events from 50 to 2,000 people. Its published specifications list a 1,364-seat tiered auditorium that divides into two 682-seat rooms, around 2,800 square metres of exhibition space divisible into three halls, 24 meeting rooms, and an 860-seat banquet room overlooking the Ōtākaro Avon River. ChristchurchNZ's venue listing puts the exhibition hall at 200-plus booths and notes the centre is managed by Legends Global. The venue holds Toitū Enviro Mark Gold, Toitū carbon zero and Qualmark Gold certifications.

Delegate movement is almost entirely on foot. The conference has blocked rooms at five central hotels and publishes walking times to the convention centre for each: Crowne Plaza Christchurch at two minutes, Quest Cathedral Junction and Quest on Kilmore at six, ibis Christchurch at seven, and Hotel Give at eleven. Bookings are handled through the conference registration process. The venue sits on the Oxford Terrace riverside edge of the CBD, within a short walk of Cathedral Square, Victoria Square, the Christchurch Town Hall and the Terrace and Riverside hospitality precincts. ChristchurchNZ notes the centre's proximity to Christchurch International Airport, which carries direct international services; the conference's travel page points delegates to airline route information for New Zealand and Christchurch, and flags onward connections for those continuing to the Biofabrication 2026 conference in Monterrey, Mexico.

Why it matters

A chapter conference of a global society landing in New Zealand for the first time is exactly the kind of international association business that Te Pae was built to attract, and it lands in late October — the shoulder of the spring conference season, when Christchurch's business-events calendar is at its busiest. The delegate profile is international and academic-clinical, drawn from across Asia, Australia and further afield, with a stated emphasis on clinician engagement and on the commercial and regulatory realities of getting regenerative therapies into practice. For the Canterbury sector it also reinforces a research-tourism link: the co-chair is a University of Otago professor, and the meeting is a visible marker of New Zealand's standing in the regional tissue-engineering community.