Dawiyat Massoudi, PhD

Education:
BCMP Cell & Molecular Biology, Physiology, Universite Paris-EST Creteil, France, 2006
Master 1st Year, Health-Biology, Universite Paris-EST, Creteil, France, 2007
Master 2nd Year, Tissue, Cell & Gene Biotherapies, Universite Paris-EST, Creteil, France, 2008
PhD Genes, Cells & Development, Universite Toulouse III, France, 2011

Research:
Dr. Massoudi’s interests in eye research focus on corneal wound healing. The cornea represents the external part of the eye and assures by its curvature and transparency approximately 70% of the total refractive power of the eye. This function is partly made possible by the particular organization of the collagen extracellular matrix contained in the corneal stroma that allows a constant refractive power. Her current eye related-research focuses on investigating the role of Procollagen C-Proteinase Enhancer 1 (PCPE-1) in corneal wound healing. PCPE-1 is known to enhance the activity of the BMP1-like proteinases in the cleavage of the C-terminal domain of the major fibrillar procollagens I-III.  They have shown recently by using different corneal injury models, that despite a delay in Procollagen I processing in primary corneal fibroblasts from Pcolce Knock-out mice, consistent with a role of PCPE-1 in corneal collagen deposition, there was no significant difference in the degree of corneal opacity after injury but instead a significant delay in corneal epithelial recovery and an increase in corneal angiogenesis. This study shows for the first time a role of PCPE-1 other than enhancing the biosynthetic processing of fibrillar procollagens and suggests that PCPE-1 might play a crucial role in corneal epithelial recovery and in angiogenesis after corneal injury.

Publications