Steven Erwood

Steven Erwood completed a PhD in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto in 2022 under the supervision of Dr. Ronald Cohn and Dr. Evgueni Ivakine. His graduate research focused on using precision gene-editing tools to better understand human genetic variation.

Following his doctoral training, Erwood was a Banting Postdoctoral Researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard under the mentorship of Professor David R. Liu. There, he worked on developing scalable therapeutic applications of prime editing. His research focused on a mutation- and disease-agnostic approach in which a single edit can correct a broad class of pathogenic variants, extending the potential reach of gene editing across multiple genetic diseases.

Erwood now leads an independent research group at SickKids, where his lab builds on this expertise 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