Christiane FERRAN

Dr. Christiane Ferran, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist and the Lewis Thomas Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. She is the co-director of the Center for Vascular Biology Research and a faculty member in the Divisions of Vascular Surgery, Transplant Surgery, and Nephrology at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Dr. Ferran received her MD from the Saint Joseph University in Beirut and her PhD in Immunology from the Pasteur Institute and Université Paris VII in Paris. She trained in internal medicine, nephrology, and kidney transplantation at Necker Hospital in Paris before pursuing research and clinical fellowships in transplant immunology, xenotransplantation, vascular biology, and nephrology at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where she remains on the faculty.

Her research focuses on defining the molecular signature of “return to homeostasis” in response to various types of injury, including inflammatory, immune, metabolic, and mechanical. Her goal is to leverage this knowledge to develop novel targeted therapies. Dr. Ferran’s laboratory is credited with discovering the potent anti-inflammatory function of the A20/TNFAIP3 gene, a key modulator of several human pathologies involving uncontrolled inflammation, such as transplant rejection, atherosclerotic vascular diseases, liver diseases, and diabetes. Her team is currently developing and testing various A20-based gene therapies and A20-inspired small molecules in pre-translational large animal models to pave the way for clinical translation.

Dr. Ferran has authored over 150 publications and edited a book on the “multiple therapeutic targets of A20.” Her research has been continuously funded for the past 28 years by the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the Roche Organ Transplantation Research Foundation, and industry-sponsored agreements.

She has received numerous awards for her scientific contributions, including the Paul Neumann Prize from the French Society of Nephrology, the Mary Jane Kugel Award from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the Avicenna Award in Health and Medical Sciences from the Harvard Arab Alumni Association, and the Inaugural Blavatnik Therapeutic Challenge Award from the Blavatnik Foundation and Harvard Medical School for developing a liver-targeted A20 gene therapy for treating type I diabetes. She was also one of 12 finalists in the 2019 Science-2-Startup competition at MassBio and is the founder of an early-stage start-up, Axxigen Therapeutics, centered around developing A20-based gene therapies.

Dr. Ferran has held and continues to hold several leadership positions. She is a past member of the Promotion Committee and an elected member of the Faculty Council at Harvard Medical School. She currently serves on the Committee for Senior Appointments at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the Board of Trustees at the Saint Joseph University of Beirut, and the advisory council for the first English-speaking medical school at the University Mohamed VI Polytechnic (UM6P) in Bengherir, Morocco.