Lab Life Video Series: George Lab

Lab Life George Laboratory

Lindsey George, MD: Hi, my name is Doctor Lindsey George. I am a physician-scientist here at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. I did my clinical training in pediatric hematology-oncology and my clinical work focuses on disorders of hemostasis. Our laboratory is focused on a study of the molecular basis of coagulation and our general goal is to understand, to better understand the molecular basis of coagulation and then we can, with the hope that we could, theoretically rationally engineer improved variants particularly of the Factor VIII protein for hemophilia A gene therapy.

Andy Vanden Heuvel, Research Technician: Everyone has a lot of expertise in a lot of different ways and a lot of different backgrounds. And so I feel like I can pick up a lot of different things from each person and kind of, you know, become more well-rounded.

Dr. George: I came in with a direct interest in coagulation as well as in gene therapy. And so, when I was looking around at fellowships, it was very clear to me that the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia was head and shoulders the best place to be for that interest. And so, CHOP has had this long standing, I would say, breadth and depth of expertise in hemophilia and gene therapy. And so, I was pretty punctuated, I would say, and wanted to be here.

John Morris, Postdoctoral Fellow: One word that describes this lab is fast-paced. You have everything at your fingertips. So, you have an idea and you want to do this experiment, you have everything that you need. We're all ready to go. You can start that day.

Cristina Martos Rus, Research Associate: So, I would say right now, like an ideal candidate would be somebody that is like very interested in like biochemistry, in coagulation as well and also in gene therapy.

Dr. George: My favorite part about the work is really the people that I have the chance to work with, you know the group in the lab. I'm really fortunate they are hardworking and very smart. The focus of our work is really helping patients and we're of course particularly interested in hemophilia A and actually I'm also a physician. I've been actively involved in some of the clinical trials of the work that we've gone back to bring back into the lab in a series of iterative process. In a way, that's really the guiding principle that guides our work and keeps us centered, keeps us focused.

And so we, I think we have a very disease specific approach to our work that spans the sort of basic biochemical studies as well as the translational work and gene therapy.