Mina Gouti

Mina Gouti is a group leader at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin, Germany. She works at the interface of developmental biology and stem cell research. During her postdoc at the Francis Crick Institute, she developed the in vitro generation of neuromesodermal progenitors from pluripotent stem cells (Gouti et al, Plos Biology 2014; Gouti et al, Dev Cell, 2017). Neuromesodermal progenitors are the building blocks of the spinal cord and musculoskeletal system in vertebrates. Building on that, her lab has pioneered the generation of 3D human neuromuscular organoids (NMOs) from human pluripotent stem cell-derived neuromesodermal progenitor cells (Martins et al, Cell Stem Cell, 2020). This is the first human organoid model where all the components of a functional neuromuscular junction are generated in 3D. The generation of human neuromuscular organoids opened up new opportunities for studying and treating neurodegenerative and neuromuscular diseases.

Mina Gouti is an EMBO young investigator and has received several distinctions and awards, including an ERC Consolidator Grant, an ERC Proof of Concept grant and the GSCN Hilde Mangold award.