Elena Navarro-Guerrero

Elena oversees the portfolio of CRISPR/Cas screens within the CHTS (Cellular High Throughput Screening) lab. She joined Xcellomics in 2021, a partnership between Exscientia, an AI-driven pharmatech company, and the University of Oxford. She supervises students and researchers of a team working on a platform to run functional genomics screens adapted to different human disease models using CRISPR/Cas, to find novel gene targets and regulatory mechanisms relevant to complex disease. She has optimized some high-content sortable read outs for marker-based CRISPR screens, escalating the available cellular phenotypes in the platform. Current research involves the development of an approach to integrate CRISPR/Cas9 machinery into human iPS-derived cells. Elena is investigating a potential link between Alzheimer's disease (AD), lipid accumulation, lipid processing and neuroinflammation using genome CRISPR knockout screening in iPSC-microglia. She performed a genome-wide CRISPR knockout screen in iPSC-derived macrophages, using TNF as read-out, to explore macrophage involvement in immune response (doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-82137-z). Elena has recently performed another genome-wide pooled CRISPR loss-of-function screen in human pancreatic beta cells, in this case using insulin-based cell-sorting, which has identified genes regulating insulin expression in type 2 diabetes (doi.org/10.1101/2021.05.28.445984).