Dr. Alan Gewirtz Memorial Scholarship

The Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society is pleased to announce the winner of the inaugural Dr. Alan Gewirtz Memorial Scholarship. Dr. Gewirtz was very influential in the field of oligonucleotides as well as in the establishment of OTS. Dr. Gewirtz's passing last November inspired OTS to create this scholarship in his honor to young researchers in the field.

The 2011 scholarship recipient was awarded to Dr. Aurélie Goyenvalle.  Congratulations!

  Aurélie Goyenvalle, Ph.D.
  PhD in Virology/Gene Therapy,
  M.Sc. in Virology, B.Sc. in Biochemistry
  MRC Functional Genomics Unit
  Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics
  University of Oxford
  South Parks Road
  Oxford OX1 3QX, UK
  e-mail : This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Biography
Aurélie Goyenvalle obtained her B.Sc. (French equivalent) in Biochemistry and Master’s Degree in Virology from the University of Paris VII and the Pasteur Institute in Paris. In 2001, she started her PhD project in the Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) Laboratory at Genethon, where she developed an exon-skipping gene therapy strategy for DMD using adeno-associated virus vectors (AAV) encoding chimeric U7snRNA constructs carrying antisense sequences. This very promising work resulted in a first-author publication in Science in 2004 and Aurelie received an Excellence in research award at the 8th annual congress of American Society of Gene Therapy and the Young investigator award of the year 2005 from the Journal of Gene Medicine European Society of Gene Therapy.  Aurelie obtained her PhD from the University of Paris VII in 2006 and was awarded an EMBO fellowship to join Professor Kay Davies lab in Oxford, where she continued developing this AAV-mediated exon skipping approach for the treatment of DMD.

Current Projects
During her postdoc in Oxford, Aurélie has shown that exon-skipping could rescue the dystrophic phenotype of a severely
affected mouse model of DMD and also focused on improving U7snRNA constructs to restore dystrophin expression in DMD
patients. Whilst this approach is soon to be tested in a clinical trial, Aurelie is currently optimizing this strategy to other
dystrophin exons and in particular investigating the possibility of multiexon-skipping, which could be applicable to a much
larger proportion of DMD patients.