Steven Erwood

Steven Erwood completed his PhD in 2022 in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Drs. Ronald Cohn and Evgueni Ivakine. His graduate work focused on applying precision gene editing tools to the understanding of human genetic variation.

Following his graduate studies, Steven pursued post-doctoral training as a Banting Postdoctoral Researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard with Professor David R. Liu. There, he focused on developing a scalable therapeutic application of prime editing. This work centered on a mutation- and disease-agnostic strategy, in which a single edit rescues a broad class of pathogenic variants rather than an individual mutation, extending the reach of gene editing across many genetic diseases at once.

He now leads an independent research group at SickKids, where his lab builds on this training in gene editing and human genetics.

Research

The Erwood lab works to understand the mechanisms underlying disease-related genetic variation in humans, and to translate that understanding into broadly applicable therapies. This work combines genome editing with high-throughput screening, alongside the engineering of improved editing tools.

Education and experience 

• 2026-Present: Assistant Professor, Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto
• 2026-Present: Scientist, The Hospital for Sick Children
• 2022-2026: Banting Postdoctoral Researcher, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
• 2017-2022: Ph.D., Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
• 2013-2016: HBSc., Biology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada  

*These authors contributed equally.

1. Pierce, SE.*, Erwood, S.*, Oye, K., An, M., Krasnow, N., Zhang, E., Raguram, A., Seelig, D., Osborne, MJ., Liu, DR. Prime editing-installed suppressor tRNAs for disease-agnostic genome editing. Nature. 647 191-202. (2025)
2. Erwood, S., Bily, TMI., Lequyer, J., Yan, J., Gulati, N., Brewer, RA., Zhou, L., Pelletier, L., Ivakine, EA., Cohn, RD. Saturation variant interpretation using CRISPR prime editing. Nature Biotechnology 40 885-895. (2022).
3. Erwood, S.*, Laselva, O.*, Bily, TMI., Brewer, RA., Rutherford, AH., Bear, CE., Ivakine, EA. Allele-specific prevention of nonsense-mediated decay in cystic fibrosis using homology- independent genome editing. Molecular Therapy – Methods & Clinical Development 17 1118-1128. (2020).
4. Erwood, S., Brewer, RA., Bily, TMI., Maino, E., Zhou, L., Cohn, RD., Ivakine, EA. Modeling Niemann–Pick disease type C in a human haploid cell line allows for patient variant characterization and clinical interpretation. Genome Research 29 2010-2019. (2019).
5. Kemaladewi, DU.*, Bassi, PS.*, Erwood, S., Al-Basha, D., Gawlik, KI., Lindsay, K., Hyatt, E., Kember, R., Place, KM., Marks, RM., Durbeej, M,. Prescott, SA., Ivakine, EA, Cohn, RD. A mutation-independent approach for muscular dystrophy via upregulation of a modifier gene. Nature. 572 125-130. (2019).

See Dr. Erwood's publication list (PubMed)

See Dr. Erwood's Google Scholar page