UC Davis lab run by LHS graduate Kyle Fink receives Award of Excellence

The Fink Lab at the UC Davis Institute for Regenerative Cures, directed by Dr. Kyle Fink, was awarded the Award for Excellence - Lab of the Year for 2025 during the CDKL5 Forum held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this October.

This marks the second time the Fink Lab was honored with this award since 2022. CDKL5 deficiency disorder (CDD) is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder that is caused by mutations in the CDKL5 gene and results in severe developmental delays, intellectual disability and very difficult to control seizures that start in very early infancy.

The disorder predominately affects females due to the gene being found on the X chromosome. The Fink Lab was the first to demonstrate in 2019 that the healthy, but dormant, copy of the gene could be reactivated from the inactive X chromosome in work published in Nucleic Acids Research. This was the first time that any lab had demonstrated targeted reactivation of a gene from the inactive X chromosome. This led to substantial funding from the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) in 2022 to advance this novel approach as a treatment for CDD.

The current findings of these studies are now under revision at Nature Communications, and further grants are pending to enable the necessary studies to be completed with the FDA to launch a first in human clinical trial.

Dr. Fink is a 2004 graduate of Lovell High School and a 2008 graduate of the University of Portland. He received a master’s degree from Central Michigan University in 2010, a PhD from the University of Nantes in 2013 and a PhD from Central Michigan University in 2013. He started an NIH funded postdoctoral scholar position at UC Davis in 2013, became faculty in the Neurology Department in 2017 and is currently the Associate Director of the Gene Therapy Center and Associate Professor of Neurology at UC Davis Health.

The son of Mike and Carol Fink of Lovell, he and wife Ashly have two children, ages 7 and 10.