GSCN 2024 Hilde Mangold Award

Mina Gouti receives the GSCN 2024 Hilde Mangold Award for her achievements as a stem cell researcher and pioneer in the generation of human neuromuscular organoids (NMOs). Mina Gouti and her team use human pluripotent stem cells to develop advanced organoid models to study the normal and pathological development of the neuromuscular system. These cutting-edge in vitro systems open up new possibilities for studying the mechanisms of neuromuscular diseases, as they uniquely enable the simultaneous generation of spinal cord neurons and skeletal muscle cells that form functional connections. Building on these models, her research team aims to uncover how certain types of spinal cord neurons and skeletal muscle cells arise during development, how they interact, and how defects in the early development of these tissues can lead to a different predisposition to neuromuscular diseases in adulthood. Her scientific excellence is reflected in the organoid technologies she has developed, which aim to standardize reproducibility and scale up organoid production using automated robotic systems and AI for high throughput drug screening approaches. Gouti's ultimate goal is to establish these advanced human-specific models as platforms for drug testing and personalized medicine.

Mina Gouti received her Master's degree in Molecular Medicine from Imperial College London and her PhD in Stem Cells and Developmental Biology from the Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens (Dr. A. Gavalas). During her postdoctoral research, she developed an inducible system to generate neurons from pluripotent stem cells with refined rostral-caudal identity. She was awarded a long-term FEBS fellowship to continue her postdoctoral research in the lab of Dr. James Briscoe at the NIMR - Francis Crick Institute in London, where she established the method for generating neuromesodermal progenitors from pluripotent stem cells. In 2016, she joined the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin as head of the research group "Stem Cell Modeling of Development and Disease". She has received numerous awards and grants, including the EMBO Young Investigator award, an ERC Consolidator grant and most recently, an ERC Proof of Concept Grant to establish the automation of her organoid technology.

Jorge Lázaro, ... Miki Ebisuya receive the "GSCN 2024 Publication of the Year Award" for their joint publication "A stem cell zoo uncovers intracellular scaling of developmental tempo across mammals", in the journal Cell Stem Cell 2023. Jorge Lázaro is part of Miki Ebisuya's scientific team at EMBL Barcelona, where the current professor at Cluster of Excellence Physics of Life at TU Dresden is also conducting research. They are investigating basic biological embryonic development in relation to different physiological times and forms of different animal species using organoids. Using pluripotent stem cells from different animals, or the "stem cell zoo", the group mimics embryonic development and thus recapitulates the time and development of morphogenesis. In the publication, they report that the speed of biochemical reactions and the gene expression correlate with the duration of the segmentation clock.

Links to Jorge Lázaro and Miki Ebisuya