Lior Zangi, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. He completed his education and training at the Weizmann Institute of Science and at Harvard University. He has established a new method, mRNA based, for gene delivery to promote cardiovascular regeneration. Currently, Dr. Zangi’s laboratory investigates cellular and organ level regenerative mechanisms that can contribute to new therapeutic approaches to repair and regenerate the heart following myocardial infarction.

Magdalena completed her Masters degree in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology at Wrocław University of Science and Technology in Poland. She went on to receive her training in Molecular Biosciences at Spanish National Centre for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC) where she received her PhD from Autonomous University of Madrid. During her PhD she worked on gene therapy to improve vascularization of the heart post-myocardial infraction and visited the group of Prof. Michele De Palma at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland for further training in using viral vectors in a therapeutic setting. Here in the Zangi lab, Magdalena works on expanding the use of modified RNA technology in gene therapy towards cell specificity and non-invasive delivery methods which can be used in many disease settings.

Jimeen received her bachelor of arts at Williams College and her Master of Biomedical Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her Master’s thesis work was titled “Enhancing atrial- specific gene expression using a calsequestrin cis-regulatory module 4 with a sarcolipin promoter.” In her work, she used an atrial-specific promoter in conjunction with an enhancer sequence to make an atrial-specific vector. Jimeen’s interest in cell specific vectors lead her to Dr. Zangi’s lab. Here she has worked closely with Dr. Kaur and Dr. Zák in the development of cell and organ-specific modified RNAs for therapeutic applications in cardiac diseases.