Izabella Agostinho Pena

Currently, Izabella is a CIHR postdoctoral research fellow at Prof. David M. Sabatini's lab at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research / Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Izabella received her PhD in Genetics and Molecular Biology in 2015 from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil working with Prof Paulo Arruda. During this training, she spent 6 months at the Structural Genomics Consortium at the University of Oxford, UK solving the crystal structure of the human aminoadipate semialdehyde synthase (AASS), a key enzyme involved in lysine catabolism. The findings from her PhD work have direct relevance to metabolic disorders of lysine degradation, particularly the rare disease Pyridoxine Dependent Epilepsy (PDE). She has proposed that inhibition of this pathway and consequently, of lysine degradation, is a novel therapeutic approach to effectively treat PDE; She has continued this project in a short postdoctoral project at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) working under the supervision of Drs Kym Boycott, Marc Ekker and Alex Mackenzie, using cell biology and zebrafish models and performing drug screenings in collaboration with Dr. Yue in Oxford. (Source: Lattes Curriculum)