Rate My Professor Ianthe Pitout

Pitout has accumulated six years of practical experience designing and evaluating antisense therapeutics in the Molecular Therapies laboratory of Professors Sue Fletcher and Steve Wilton. Her PhD innovations contributed to a molecule advancing through early-phase commercialization by PYC Therapeutics for inherited retinopathy. Her current research develops novel strategies for MND, encompassing drugs to modulate autophagy and reduce protein toxicity, genetic biomarkers for clinical trial patient stratification, and MND cell models to assess antisense oligonucleotide therapeutics. She supervises doctoral students on projects related to personalised therapeutics for MND and autophagy upregulation. Pitout has been awarded the Western Australian Innovator of the Year by the Government of Western Australia, the Peter Stearne Familial MND Research Grant as lead researcher, and the Run MND NSW Research Grant for a new drug candidate targeting C9ORF72-linked MND. She contributed to a team securing a $1 million FightMND grant for MND treatment testing. Key publications include 'Antisense-mediated splice intervention to treat human disease: the odyssey continues' (2019), 'Association of a structural variant within the SQSTM1 gene with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis' (2020), 'Characterising splicing defects of ABCA4 variants within exons 13 and 14 in inherited retinal disease patients' (2022), 'Modulation of CNOT3 expression using antisense oligomers to treat inherited retinal disease' (2021), and 'Paraspeckle condensation is controlled via TDP-43 polymerization and linked to neuroprotection' (2026). Her work advances molecular medicine for genetic and neurodegenerative disorders.