Christine Petit, MD, PhD

Biography

Dr. Petit is a geneticist and neuroscientist whose work has elucidated key molecular and cellular mechanisms of hearing and associated disorders through a pioneering genetic dissection. She studied medicine simultaneously with genetics and biochemistry at the Faculty of Sciences, Paris XI University. She became a research scientist at Institut Pasteur in the mid-1970s and a professor at Collège de France, where she holds the Genetics and Cell Physiology chair, in 2002. She became founding director of the Hearing Institute, an Institut Pasteur center affiliated with INSERM in Paris, in 2019.

Fascinated by sensory perception, Dr. Petit first initiated a genetic approach to studying olfactory system development by identifying genes responsible for Kallmann’s syndrome, revealing the role of anosmin-1 in neuronal patterning. In the early 1990s, having realized that the auditory system had escaped molecular characterization due to the paucity of cells in the cochlea, she suggested a genetic dissection of sound processing in this sensory organ, based on the genes responsible for sensorineural deafness in humans. She pioneered this field, identifying a number of these genes, most of which frequently cause deafness, by studying geographically isolated deaf populations. 

By multidisciplinary studies of the roles of the proteins encoded by deafness genes and associated protein complexes and networks, she elucidated molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying hair bundle development and functions, including mechanoelectrical transduction, and revealed the key roles played by various sets of fibrous links connecting the stereocilia within hair bundles and to the tectorial membrane. She also deciphered molecular mechanisms involved in cochlear ion and redox homeostasis and neurotransmitter exocytosis at the hair-cell synapse. In parallel, she elucidated the pathogenic processes underlying numerous human hereditary forms of deafness, thereby paving the way for the development of therapeutic approaches where there are currently none. In recent years, she and her colleagues have been exploring gene therapy for the treatment of hereditary deafness, providing proof of concept for several forms of deafness.

Dr. Petit is a member of the French Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). She has received many awards, including the L’Oréal-UNESCO "For Women in Science" Award  in 2004, the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2006, the INSERM Grand Prix de la Recherche Médicale in 2007, The Brain Prize from the Grete Lundbeck Foundation in 2012, and the Kavli Prize, which she shared with Jim Hudspeth and Robert Fettiplace, in 2018.

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