Biographies
Team Members

Hannah Mitchison
Researcher, Centre Leadership team

Hannah is Professor of Molecular Medicine at University College London and Head of the Genetics and Genomic Medicine Department at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health. She works on Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia (PCD), a disorder of the airway surface cilia (hairlike structures that keep lungs clear by mucus flow). Working in close collaboration with the PCD patient support groups and NHS clinical network, she has sequenced 100s of PCD patient’s DNA to find their causal gene variants and determine the affected gene functions in the airway cells or in different ciliate model organisms. This has identified many of the PCD genes and their biological roles in cilia growth and motility. She is now translating this knowledge to the clinic, by developing RNA-based genetic medicines for PCD, to rescue the causal gene defects.

Together with Prof Steve Hart at UCL, within the RRD Centre she leads on development of novel nucleic acid-based therapeutics for PCD, her own group focussing especially on antisense oligonucleotide therapies and the airway delivery challenge. Hannah has a great interest in improving the genetic understanding of PCD, to tackle the current under-diagnosis and lack of clinical recognition of this condition. She will help develop the Centre’s genotyped PCD patient bioresource, to support and target genetic therapy trials. To resolve the ‘VUS problem’ that complicates PCD genetic diagnosis, she is the co-chair of the ClinGen Motile Ciliopathy GCEP (Gene Curation Expert Panel) and within the BEAT-PCD ERS Clinical Research Collaboration she is on the team developing CiliaVar, the first open-access database of PCD genes and their disease variant information.