Sander Houten, PhD

Dr. Sander M. Houten has a Ph.D. from the faculty of Medicine of the University of Amsterdam. During his PhD project, he discovered that a deficiency of mevalonate kinase causes hyper-IgD syndrome, one of the periodic fever syndromes. He conducted studies to understand the consequences of this defect on cellular isoprenoid and cholesterol metabolism. As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Johan Auwerx at the Institut de Génétique et de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire in Strasbourg, France, Dr. Houten studied mechanisms underlying the transcriptional control of metabolism in different mouse models. His research focused on signaling events elicited by metabolites and nuclear hormone receptors. He characterized metabolic effects of bile acids and defined a novel bile acid signaling pathway that affects energy homeostasis. For his second postdoctoral fellowship, Dr. Houten returned to the Academic Medical Center of the University of Amsterdam and combined his interest in regulation of metabolic processes and human genetics. He initiated a line of research on the pathophysiology of mitochondrial fatty acid oxidation defects and was promoted to Principal Investigator. He applied state-of-the-art phenotyping methods to mouse models for mitochondrial fatty acid oxidation defects, which yielded new and unexpected insights in the pathophysiology of hypoglycemia and cardiac hypertrophy associated with these disorders. Dr. Houten is currently a tenured Associate Professor (Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai). He explores pathophysiological mechanisms in disorders of fatty acid oxidation and lysine degradation with the ultimate aim to develop new therapies.

To view a complete list of Dr. Houten's publication click here