Anne Rovelet-Lecrux

Anne Rovelet-Lecrux is a French scientist, research engineer at the University of Rouen Normandy. She is working in a team joined to the Rouen University Hospital, and leading the French National Reference Center for Early Onset Alzheimer Disease. This unique environment enables gathering of geneticists, neurologists and fundamental biologists, thus favorizing translational research.

Anne Rovelet-Lecrux has started working on Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias since her PhD, which focused on the genetic bases of neurodegenerative disorders, with a particular interest on genomic rearrangements. She mainly reported that APP duplications are a cause of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, and that partial deletions and duplications of the MAPT gene are a cause of dementia. Following her PhD, she pursued her work on the genetics of dementia using pioneering genome-wide analysis methods, which led to the discovery of several novel genes involved in the genetic determinism of AD. Into her team, she notably described the major contribution of SORL1 rare variants in early-onset AD.

Besides genetic analysis, she dedicated a large part of her work to the development of experimental models; to improve the relevance of cellular models for the study of neurodegenerative disorders, she turned to the use of CRISPR/Cas-modified stem cells. The objective is to enable a better understanding of the pathophysiological processes underpinning Alzheimer’s disease, but also to provide data regarding the strength of the mutations identified in patients, allowing genetic counseling.