Elena Navarro Guerrero

Elena oversees the portfolio of CRISPR-Cas9 screens within the lab and supervises students and researchers. She joined Xcellomics in 2021, a partnership between Exscientia, an AI-driven pharmatech company, and the University of Oxford. She is part of a research team working on a platform to run phenotypic screens adapted to different cell models using CRISPR-Cas9, a clever tool which enables the finding of regulatory mechanisms and gene targets relevant to 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. For instance, she performed a genome-wide 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). She has recently performed another genome-wide pooled CRISPR loss-of-function screen in human pancreatic beta cells, in this case with insulin-based cell-sorting, which has identified genes regulating insulin expression in type 2 diabetes (doi.org/10.1101/2021.05.28.445984).