TOP grant

Together with the laboratories of Madelon Maurice and Onno Kranenburg, we received a TOP grant of €675k from ZonMW, the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development. We aim to understand why seemingly identical combinations of genetic alterations (mutations) can lead to different forms of colorectal cancer in terms of Read more…

Expansion

We welcome 2 new Postdocs to join our team. Michiel Boekhout finished his first postdoc at MSKCC in NY, USA, studying double-strand break formation in DNA during meiosis (Keeney lab). Suzanne van der Horst studied stem cells in C. elegans using real-time imaging and CRISPR-mediated genetic knock-ins (Van den Heuvel Read more…

ERC starting grant

Hugo received a prestigious ERC starting grant (€1,5M) from the EU in support of our studies to understand the cause and consequence of diverging behaviors between different tumor cell types. The project will rely heavily on real-time monitoring of cell type specification in tumors (organoids), as well as quantitative measurements Read more…

New paper is out

Integrated multi-omics analyses of organoid model systems to study lineage specification in the intestinal epithelium (Mol Syst Biol). Great work, spearheaded by the lab of Michiel Vermeulen, RIMLS, Nijmegen.

HFSP young investigator grant

Together with the laboratories of Young Seok Ju (KAIST, Daejeon, SK) and Bon-Kyoung Koo (IMBA, Vienna, Austria), we received a Young Investigator grant ($1M) from the Human Frontier Science Program. We will study hyper mutagenesis on the course of tumor evolution in gastric cancers.

STAR reporter published in Cell reports

We developed and validated a synthetic enhancer/promoter element that provides specific transcriptional activity in intestinal stem cells. The reporter, called STAR, is a user-friendly system to monitor and manipulate stem cells in human organoids. Among others, we documented that cell fate plasticity in tumors is an inherited trait from normal Read more…