2021 Sex & Gender Differences Competitive Fellowship Awardee
Alexandra Santos is a Masters of Applied Science student in Biomedical Engineering at University of Toronto. She is supervised by Dr Peter Carlen, where the focus of her work involves modelling epileptiform activity in human cerebral organoids as well as looking at the effects of cannabis compounds on in vitro seizure models. Alexandra plans to compare the H9 (female sex) and H1 (male sex) organoid lines in terms of their response to seizure induction and treatments, to better understand how sex plays a role in the development of epilepsy and its drug response. The main aim of this work is to develop a high-throughput, drug testing platform for personalized medicine to better address the unique clinical needs of individuals with epilepsy.
