Kristin Knouse, MD, PhD

Research Summary

The Knouse Laboratory aims to understand and modulate regenerative capacity with the goal of developing novel treatments for diverse diseases. We focus on the mammalian liver, which has the unique ability to completely regenerate itself, in order to identify the molecular requirements for cell cycle re-entry from dormancy and effective organ regeneration. To achieve this, we innovate genetic tools that allow us to investigate organ injury and regeneration directly within the living organism. We will leverage our discoveries to identify novel therapeutic approaches for disease states ranging from tissue degeneration to cancer.

The most therapeutically intractable aspect of cancer is often not the rapidly proliferating cells that constitute primary tumors, but rather the cells that disseminate from the primary tumor to sites throughout the body. These cells can lie dormant for years, evading the chemotherapies designed to target rapidly dividing cells, until ultimately re-entering the cell cycle to initiate metastatic disease. Our studies of dormancy and cell cycle re-entry in the liver will enable us to understand and target dormant cancer cells in order to prevent metastatic disease.

Biography

Kristin Knouse received a BS in biology from Duke University in 2010 and then enrolled in the Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology MD-PhD program, where she earned a PhD through the MIT Department of Biology in 2016 and an MD through the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology in 2018. She conducted her doctoral research in the laboratory of Angelika Amon, where she developed tools to characterize large-scale somatic copy number alterations in mammalian tissues and then used diverse approaches to reveal the importance of tissue architecture for chromosome segregation fidelity in epithelia. In 2018, Knouse established her laboratory as a Whitehead Fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and was honored with the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award. In 2021, she became an assistant professor in the MIT Department of Biology and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

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