Boaz Levi is an Associate Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. He came to the Allen Institute to work on a stem cell model of human cortical development after completing a post-doctoral fellowship in stem cell biology in the Morrison lab at the University of Michigan, and a PhD on the genetics of organogenesis in the Krasnow lab at Stanford University.

His team at Allen is focused on building tools to interrogate the cells that compose the mammalian brain. Towards this end, they are building enhancer-AAV tools to mark and manipulate neural cell types across species. His group generated some of the first scATAC-seq datasets from human cortex that revealed selectively accessible region in populations of neurons and glia. They have leveraged this data, and much larger new datasets, to build a large collection of enhancer-AAVs for many cell populations throughout the brain.

His team is applying their enhancer-AAV tools to build gene therapies for untreatable neurological diseases. Their gene therapy expertise has been enabled through a commercial partnership on several undisclosed indications, NIH BRAIN Initiative support, and Allen Institute internal funding. Their first gene therapy project is focused on Dravet syndrome, and they have achieved excellent rescue using an inhibitory circuit selective SCN1A gene replacement approach. Levi and his team are excited to continue to apply our circuit-selective tools to build better therapeutics to help patients suffering from neurological diseases.