Dr. Taghian is a junior faculty at Department of Radiology and Horae Gene Therapy Center at UMass Chan Medical School. The focus of her research is to develop and translate gene therapy treatments for rare neurological disorders. She received her PhD in Physics from University of Cincinnati where her research was on developing electric field-based therapy to treat diabetic wounds. To expand her multidisciplinary experience, she joined UMass Chan with a special interest in biomedical imaging. She has been training in gene therapy under mentorship of Dr. Gray-Edwards where she has characterized central nervous system changes in large and small animal models of human genetic diseases including Tay-Sachs, Sandhoff, Maple Syrup Urine disease, cerebellar ataxia, and Huntington’s disease. She has expertise in performing efficacy studies of AAV gene therapy in these models using noninvasive in vivo MRI techniques and correlation analysis with post-mortem findings. She has applied her experience to human clinical trials in the analysis of CSF based biomarkers from an ongoing clinical trial for Tay-Sachs and Sandhoff diseases. Her work also includes investigating new delivery routes of therapeutics to central nervous system. Dr. Taghian is a member of the Translational Institute for Molecular Therapeutics at UMass Chan and is leading the gene therapy team in the development of an AAV gene therapy for patients with an ultra-rare neurological disorder called UBA5.
Dr. Toloo Taghian
