Current Grantee Profiles

Dr. Donahoe serves as Director of the Pediatric Surgical Research Laboratories at Massachusetts General Hospital and Marshall K. Bartlett Professor of Surgery at the Harvard Medical School. She is an Associate Member of the Broad Institute, Principle Faculty at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and Associate Faculty of the Center for Human Genetics Research. Dr. Donahoe has published over 275 peer-reviewed publications, and holds 12 patents concerning Mullerian Inhibiting Substance (MIS). She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine. Her work at the interface of clinical endocrinology in the care and reconstruction of children with intersex anomalies and research in reproductive developmental biology and oncology, led to the hypothesis that MIS could serve as a potential anticancer agent against human ovarian carcinomas as a tumor of Mullerian duct origin. Since MIS also acts in the ovary, recent work with Dr. David Pepin led to the study of MIS as a permanent contraceptive agent for cats and dogs.

Dr. Pépin joined the Harvard Medical School faculty in 2014 as an Instructor in the department of Surgery where he holds the title of Assistant in Surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and Assistant in Molecular Biology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Pépin was trained as a reproductive biologist at the University of Ottawa, Canada, where he completed a PhD elucidating the role of chromatin remodeling during ovarian development and in ovarian cancers. During his training, he demonstrated that epigenetic factors, and in particular chromatin regulators, orchestrate granulosa cell differentiation during folliculogenesis and control growth and differentiation of the ovarian follicle. In 2011, he joined the Pediatric Surgical Research Laboratories at the Massachusetts General Hospital as a Research Fellow and an Ann Schreiber Mentored Investigator, to lead the research team evaluating Mullerian Inhibiting Substance (MIS) for the treatment of ovarian cancer and for female contraception. He recently engineered new peptide modifications of the MIS recombinant protein and introduced them into an adeno-associated viral gene therapy vector for pre-clinical evaluation as a permanent sterilant in cats and dogs.