News

We welcome two new PhD students to our team, J&J. As students, Julian and Joris have both been matured in our lab, with their grand finales at Rockefeller University (NY) and University of Cambridge (UK) respectively.

Proud to be one of the seven projects in the Organ-on-Chip Showcases call that have been awarded a grant by Top Sector Life Sciences & Health (Health~Holland). I will continue to explore the use of microfluidics (from industrial partner VyCAP) with live-cell imaging of organoids to study tumor evolution.

Koen successfully defended his thesis called ‘Cell fate dynamics in intestinal homeostasis and cancer’. He is now gone to the lab of Jacco van Rheenen (NKI, Amsterdam) in preparation to his upcoming adventure in the lab of Prisca Liberali (FMI, Basel). We wish him all the luck in science and Read more…

Our collaborative study with the Kops laboratory is published in Nature Genetics. We performed detailed live-cell microscopy on patient-derived tumor organoids from colorectal cancer patients, to study chromosomal instability levels and cell fate options after erroneous divisions in correlation to karyotype evolution. Among others we show that chromosomal instability is Read more…

Fantastic work from the Kloosterman and Clevers laboratories in Nature Medicine about the development of a new platform for the culture of ovarian cancer organoids. Nizar worked hard on the drug screening of these organoids to support the claim that these organoids can assist in personalized therapy design as well Read more…

Our new study is published in Oncotarget, featuring a CRISPR-screen to test the impact of RASGAP deficiencies on anti-EGFR therapy-resistance in colorectal cancer. Fantastic work by Jasmin to make genetic knock-out organoids and optimize biochemical analysis of the MAPK pathway in these models

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…

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…

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…

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.