The CRC welcomes Sébastien Levesque as a regular member. A specialist in precision genome editing, he will develop technologies applied to functional genomics, gene therapy and cancer immunotherapy.
A former student member of the CRC, Sébastien Levesque first completed a master’s degree in microbiology under the supervision of Professor Sylvain Moineau, followed by a PhD in molecular medicine under the supervision of Professor Yannick Doyon. He distinguished himself through the excellence of his academic path, notably by receiving a prestigious Banting postdoctoral fellowship.
During his PhD, Sébastien Levesque developed new genome-editing approaches based on CRISPR technologies. These tools facilitated the creation of cellular models for cancer research and the engineering of CAR-T cells for immunotherapy. His work has led to major publications and is now used by research teams around the world.
After earning his PhD in 2022, Sébastien Levesque pursued postdoctoral training at several leading institutions, including Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Under the supervision of Dr. Daniel E. Bauer, recognized for his contributions to the development of the first CRISPR-based gene therapy approved for clinical use, he contributed to new gene-editing strategies targeting inherited blood disorders and to the improvement of technologies such as prime editing. His work has been published in leading journals, including Nature, Nature Biotechnology and Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.
Since April 2026, Sébastien Levesque has been a principal investigator at the Centre de recherche du CHU de Québec–Université Laval, within the Reproduction, Maternal and Child Health research axis. He also joined the Department of Pediatrics in the Faculty of Medicine at Université Laval as an assistant professor in July 2026.
His research program focuses on the development of precision genome-editing technologies applied to functional genomics, gene therapy and cancer immunotherapy. His team designs new tools based on protein and RNA engineering to make therapeutic genome editing more efficient, precise and safe. These approaches could accelerate the development of treatments for rare genetic diseases and improve cell therapies against cancer, including next-generation CAR-T cells.
The CRC welcomes him and wishes him great success in developing his research program and training the next generation of scientists.