Dr. French manages the human stem cell model development of ENDD. She is also Director of the Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Core at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and a Research Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. French has extensive experience in the field of pluripotent stem cell biology and established the CHOP core in 2008. She has research experience in the areas of Immunology, Hematology, and Cell Biology with areas of expertise including megakaryocytes and platelets, integrin adhesion receptors, and pluripotent stem cell biology. Her primary research focus is in the field of platelet biology, though as Director of the Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Core she has been centrally involved in a host of significant scientific collaborations. She has built a solid foundation for modeling human disease to study mechanism, development, and establish new therapeutic modalities.
At ENDD, Dr. French oversees human model development including induced pluripotent stem cell generation, characterization, and quality control; differentiation to the appropriate germ layer and derivative lineage, including hematopoietic and neuronal; and gene editing using the CRISPR/Cas9 technology. The ability to edit genes using the CRISPR/Cas9 technology has been a game-changer in the field and is being utilized on established pluripotent stem cell lines for creating isogenic control and variant pairs or an allelic series of gene variants on a uniform genetic background for genotype-phenotype studies.