Professorship awarded to Mina Gouti

ECN member Mina Gouti has been awarded a professorship at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. The appointment will strengthen her pioneering organoid research at the Max Delbrück Center and deepen collaboration with clinicians to advance personalized medicine.

Dr. Mina Gouti, Group Leader of the Stem Cell Modeling of Development and Disease lab at the Max Delbrück Center, has been appointed W3 Professor of Complex Organoid Models for Personalized Medicine in the Medical Faculty, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. The permanent position recognizes her achievements in developing advanced organoid systems to understand how specific types of spinal cord neurons and skeletal muscle cells grow in space and time during development.

“This professorship will enable my team to fully leverage Berlin’s exceptional biomedical ecosystem and to work closely with clinicians at Charité to create complex organoids for personalized medicine,” Gouti says. This close interaction is essential for translating patient-derived organoid models into clinically relevant insights.”

^{Mina Gouti at a sterile hood. She replaces the nutrient fluid for the organoids with a pipette. © Pablo Castagnola / MDC}

The Gouti lab has developed three-dimensional neuromuscular organoids from human pluripotent stem cells that replicate key features of spinal cord neurons and skeletal muscle – providing powerful platforms for studying neuromuscular diseases such as spinal muscular atrophy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and for drug screening. Such organoids can also be grown from cells derived from individual patients to model their specific disease.

The position reflects a shared vision between the Max Delbrück Center and Charité to accelerate translational research through fostering closer collaboration between clinicians researchers. “We now have the long-term perspective required to develop complex, functional organoids as predictive platforms for personalized medicine and early disease interception,” says Gouti. “We hope our research will lead to better health outcomes not only for people with neuromuscular diseases, but also those at high risk of developing them.”

Source: MDC NEWS