Sara Guerrisi is an Medical Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership PhD student in the Department of Basic & Clinical Neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's College London. She is supervised by Professor Joseph Bateman and Professor Deepak Srivastava.

Her project, "Developing an in vitro therapeutic platform for mTORopathies", focuses on Tuberous Sclerosis Complex (TSC) related epilepsy and brain symptoms, specifically investigating how alterations of TSC1 shape the brain and lead to TSC-associated tumors.

Using hIPSC-derived neurons and 3D organoids, she aims to uncover the poorly understood molecular mechanisms of TSC-related epilepsy, which is frequently drug-resistant and a leading cause of mortality in patients. To address this, she is collaborating with Oxford StemTech to create a unique high-throughput drug testing platform.

Previously, she worked as a Research Assistant for three years, focusing on multiple rare genetic neurodevelopmental disorders using Next-Generation Sequencing and hIPSC-derived models.

Research interests

• Epilepsy
• Neurodevelopmental Disorders
• Molecular Genetics
• hIPSCs-derived models