Description of Research Expertise

Dr. Raabe is a Research Assistant Professor at the Division of Translational Medicine and Human Genetics at the Department of Medicine. His lab is pioneering the derivation and characterization of adult mouse and human liver derived bipotent ductal organoids. These organoids can be cloned and passaged over many months in culture but their genetic manipulation is challenging. The Raabe lab uses these organoids for liver cell/gene therapy as well as for liver disease modeling and drug screening. Recently, the Raabe lab discovered that bipotent ductal organoids can readily be derived from endstage MASH patient liver and have shown that they share many functional properties of the MASH liver they were derived from. This opens a new area of personalized functional analysis and medicine for MASH based on MASH patient liver derived organoids. In addition, the Raabe lab has strong expertise in CRISPR-mediated gene targeting, originally by generation many novel CRISPR mediated mice. Most recently, he works on CRISPR - generated knockout and knockin models in human tissue derived organoids which are traditionally hard to genetically manipulate. In 2023 Dr. Raabe has initiated a collaboration with the Weissmann lab at the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation to use mRNA LNPs for fast and efficient CRISPR mediated gene targeting directly in organoids. This has the potential to revolutionize gene targeting of human tissue derived organoids. This in turn will allow to effectively study the function of specific genes in human diseased tissue derived organoids and to screen for gene specific LNP mediated CRISPR treatments.