Deborah French

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Deborah L. French, PhD

Director, Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Core

Dr. French came to CHOP in 2008 to establish the Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Core in the Center for Cellular and Molecular Therapeutics. She is an internationally recognized researcher involved in multi-investigator teams that utilize pluripotent stem cells for modeling human disease to study mechanism, development, and establish new therapeutic modalities.

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Bio

Dr. French’s primary research interest has been in the area of megakaryopoiesis and platelet biology. She is continuing this work using human pluripotent stem cells to study pediatric and adult genetic diseases, including hematological disorders.

The pluripotent stem cell technology represents a major breakthrough for studying disease because these cells express human genes of interest, they can be differentiated in vitro to the three germ layers and derivative tissues, they can be genetically manipulated, and they allow for easy access to cells for in-depth structural, functional, and molecular characterization.

Dr. French is involved in a broad spectrum of projects using these cells to model human development and disease. Dr. French and her colleagues have shown a number of hematopoietic pathologies to be successfully recapitulated through differentiation of patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells, including Glanzmann thrombasthenia, Down syndrome, and juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia. In addition to using renewable sources of pluripotent stem cell-derived human hematopoietic lineages for therapeutic and investigative applications, she is genome editing pluripotent stem cells using the CRISPR-CAS9 technology. This technology is a major breakthrough enabling the generation of cells lines that are genetically identical except for the variant sequence of interest. The ability to generate isogenic lines has eliminated the clonal heterogeneity observed when comparing cell lines of different genetic backgrounds during differentiations to derivative tissues and downstream functional applications.

Dr. French's career achievements include: