Valerie VG Gouon-Evans, PharmD, PhD

Biography

Dr. Valerie Gouon-Evans is Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine and Center for Regenerative Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine, Boston Medical Center. She is the Director of the Boston University Liver Biologist (BULB) program and Co-director of the Molecular and Translational Medicine PhD program in the Department of Medicine at BU.

The Gouon-Evans Lab has greatly contributed to the efficient generation of hepatocytes from mouse, human and macaque pluripotent stem cells, and specifically pioneered the use of BMP4 to induce hepatic specification, an approach now utilized widely in the pluripotent stem cell field. Since Dr. Gouon-Evans lab moved to Boston University Boston Medical Center in 2017, her research interests have aimed to translate her developmental discoveries to harness liver regeneration. Gouon-Evans Lab is currently developing strategies to treat various liver diseases such as developing cell transplantation strategies to repopulate diseased liver mouse models, promoting intrinsic liver regeneration by harnessing hepatocyte regeneration or inducing differentiation of cholangiocytes into healthy hepatocytes. All these projects utilize nucleoside modified mRNA complexed to lipid nanoparticles, a technology that her lab has optimized and validated to induce transient yet robust expression of proteins in the liver to accelerate liver regeneration.