Young Investigator, l'institut du thorax INSERM, France
Biography
After achieving his PhD in Bordeaux under the direction of Dr. Jean Rosenbaum, Dr. Si-Tayeb joined the research team of Professor Stephen Duncan at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI. Together, they developed a strategy to direct patient-derived hiPS cells to become liver cells and study metabolic diseases, including familial hypercholesterolemia. Back in France, and after a short passage in Paris, Dr. Si-Tayeb joined the "institut du thorax" in Nantes in order to work more specifically on PCSK9 together with Prof Bertrand Cariou, an MD-PhD who specializes in endocrinology who participated in clinical trials on PCSK9 inhibition and Dr Cédric Le May specialized in lipid metabolism. Dr. Si-Tayeb and his team showed how it is possible to isolate cells from urine samples, amplify them, reprogram them into hiPS cells and then direct them to become liver cells. Starting with urine samples of patients from the Nantes area, they showed that it was possible to model the effects of PCSK9 mutations on LDL uptake in a petri dish.