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Dr Karine Rizzoti

Karine

Senior Lecturer

Centre: Endocrinology

Email: k.rizzoti@qmul.ac.uk
Telephone: +44(0) 20 7882 6292

Profile

ORCID iD: 0000-0003-0711-5452

Karine is a senior lecturer in the Centre for Endocrinology at the William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London. She studied in Toulouse (France) at the Université Paul Sabatier, where she also completed a PhD in Developmental Biology. During her postdoctoral training in London at the National Institute for Medical Research, supported by a Marie Curie fellowship, and later at the Francis Crick Institute, she helped define and characterise murine pituitary stem cells. This work laid the foundation for her current programme, which investigates how these cells contribute to pituitary plasticity in different physiological and pathological contexts. In 2025, she received an MRC New Investigator Award to establish her independent research group at QMUL.

Other

Research

We are interested in how stem cells decide their fate and how this is controlled in different contexts. Understanding these mechanisms will reveal principles of embryogenesis and tissue homeostasis, and open ways to manipulate stem cells for therapeutic applications, disease models and drug screening.

The organ in which we are investigating these questions is the pituitary gland where we have previously characterised a population of stem cells. The adult pituitary has a low cell turn-over and resident stem cells are relatively quiescent: they do proliferate very little and do not give rise to many new endocrine cells. However, we have identified different contexts in which they become activated:

  • after ablation of an organ controlled by the pituitary, where they exclusively give rise to the endocrine cell controlling the absent organ.
  • in neonates, where they give rise to a new population of postnatal gonadotrophs, the endocrine cells controlling puberty and reproduction which will populate the gland along an embryonic, pre-existing population of gonadotrophs.
  • We are interested in understanding what prompt stem cells exit from quiescence, and how their fate toward specific endocrine cell types is specified. We are also keen to understand the role of postnatal versus embryonic gonadotrophs.

For these aims, we are using different mouse models in which we can analyse the progeny of stem cells and manipulate different genes and/or cell populations. This work is complemented by in vitro approaches using pituispheres, which are 3D spheres formed by stem cells under optimised conditions. Single cell analyses complement our approaches to help characterising cell identities, states and trajectories, and cell population interactions.

Publications

  • Calleja V, Henry JC, Cobbaut M et al. (2025). The chordoid glioma PRKCA D463H mutation is a kinase inactive, gain-of-function allele that induces early-onset chondrosarcoma in mice. nameOfConference


  • Sheridan D, Chakravarty P, Golan G et al. (publicationYear). Gonadotrophs have a dual origin, with most derived from early postnatal pituitary stem cells. nameOfConference


    QMRO: qmroHref
  • Das P, Jabal DA, Sunny DA et al. (2024). 9264 The interplay of FOXO1 and NR3C1 in the development and function of pituitary somatotropes. nameOfConference


    QMRO: qmroHref
  • Galichet C, Rizzoti K, Lovell-Badge R (publicationYear). Hypopituitarism in Sox3 null mutants correlates with altered NG2-glia in the median eminence and is influenced by aspirin and gut microbiota. nameOfConference


    QMRO: qmroHref
  • Rizzoti K, Lovell-Badge R, Chakravarty P et al. (publicationYear). SOX9-positive pituitary stem cells differ according to their position in the gland and maintenance of their progeny depends on context. nameOfConference


    QMRO: qmroHref
  • Rizzoti K, Chakravarty P, Sheridan D et al. (2023). SOX9-positive pituitary stem cells differ according to their position in the gland and maintenance of their progeny depends on context. nameOfConference


    QMRO: qmroHref
  • Chen Q, Leshkowitz D, Li H et al. (2023). Neural plate progenitors give rise to both anterior and posterior pituitary cells. nameOfConference


    QMRO: qmroHref
  • Cheung LYM, Menage L, Rizzoti K et al. (2023). Novel Candidate Regulators and Developmental Trajectory of Pituitary Thyrotropes. nameOfConference


    QMRO: qmroHref
  • Caramello A, Galichet C, Sopena ML et al. (2022). The cortical hem lacks stem cell potential despite expressing SOX9 and HOPX. nameOfConference


    QMRO: qmroHref
  • Saenz-Antoñanzas A, Moncho-Amor V, Elúa-Pinín A et al. (2022). P02.10.A CRISPR/Cas9 deletion of SOX2 Regulatory Region 2 (SRR2) decreases SOX2 malignant activity in glioblastoma. nameOfConference


    QMRO: qmroHref
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Sponsors

Collaborators

Internal

External

  • Philippa Melamed, Technion Institute, Aifa, Israel
  • Patrice Mollard, Institut de Genomique Fonctionelle, Montpellier, France
  • Tatiana Fiordelisio, Mexico Autonomous University, Mexico City, Mexico
  • Mehul Dattani, Institute for Child Health, University College London, UK
  • Robin Lovell-Badge, Francis Crick Institute, London, UK.

News

Disclosures

None.

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