Dr. Laczko was born and raised in Hungary and received her medical degree at the University of Szeged. Upon completion of her medical studies, she enrolled in the PhD program at the same institution where she studied the role of epithelial ion transport processes in the development and progression of gastrointestinal diseases. During her PhD years, she spent one and a half years as a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Division of Gastroenterology where she was working to establish a 3-D esophageal organotypic culture system to better model the inflammatory processes of the esophagus. After the successful defense of her PhD thesis, she could not imagine any career path other than a physician-scientist, therefore she returned to the USA for additional training. For her post-doctoral studies, she joined the laboratory of Dr. Drew Weissman who was well known for his pioneering discovery of a novel vaccine delivery platform using nucleoside-modified mRNA encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles (LNPs). During her postdoctoral training, she studied the effectiveness of modified mRNA-LNP vaccines against various pathogens, and she was the lead author of one of the first manuscripts that demonstrated the effectiveness of the mRNA vaccine against COVID- 19 in a mouse model in July 2020. Following her post-doctoral training she entered the pathology residency program at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. During the research phase of her residency training, she started working on a project with Drs. Taku Kambayashi and David Fajgenbaum to study a mouse model of Castleman disease, which is a rare, devastating cytokine-storm-related hematologic disease of unknown etiology. Currently, she is completing her subspecialty fellowship in Hematopathology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania while she continues working to identify additional therapeutic targets to better treat Castleman disease flares using this mouse model.
Dr. Dorottya Laczko
