Prof. Dr. med. Janine Reichenbach

Area of Research

Description of Research Interest

Gene therapy is a recent break-through therapeutic field that has the potential to cure innate or acquired diseases by correcting or circumventing disease-causing genetic mutations. Our translational research is fully dedicated to the design, pre-clinical development, and clinical implementation of gene therapy treatments for incurable diseases. Our mission is to accelerate medical application of scientific discoveries arising from fundamental research, uniting expertise of basic and translational researchers as well as clinicians at the University Medicine Zurich hub. We are developing innovative gene and cell therapies for immunological, hematological and neurodegenerative diseases. Our current focus is hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) based ex vivo gene therapy, using two approaches: viral vector gene therapy, consisting of addition of a correct coding sequence of the mutated gene into the patient’s HSC genome by lentiviral vectors, and genome editing, allowing for targeted insertion of corrective sequences at a defined, ideally the endogenous locus of the mutated gene, or for excision of mutated DNA sequence.

Special Expertise

Gene therapy (preclinical animal models, clinical phase I/II gene therapy studies)
Retroviral vector design (tissue specific transgene expression, silencing resistant transgene expression)
Targeted genome editing (CRISPR/Cas9, TALEN)
Immunodeficiencies
Pediatrics

Member of Collaborative/interdisciplinary Research Consortia

We are member of the University Research Priority Program (URPP) Itinerare of the University of Zurich:
https://www.itinerare.uzh.ch/en.html