General
On November 10th, from 16:00 – 17:15, our keynote speaker will be Prof. Dr. Sarah-Maria Fendt of the KU Leuven in Belgium. She will be joined by Marjolein Kes of the Princess Maxima Center and Utrecht University.
Prof. Sarah-Maria Fendt
“Metabolic rewiring driving metastasis formation”
“Sarah-Maria Fendt is a Principal Investigator at the VIB Center for Cancer Biology and Professor of Oncology at KU Leuven, Belgium. Sarah has a Master degree of Science in Biochemistry from TU Munich and a PhD in Molecular Systems Biology from the ETH Zurich. Sarah worked as postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), before starting her independent research program in 2013. Sarah’s lab is specifically interested in understanding the role of metabolism in driving metastasis formation and in defining the principles of metabolic regulation that enable cancer cells to communicate with and respond to their environment. Her team applies the powerful technologies of single cell and spatial multi-omics analysis in pre-clinical mouse models and patient samples to study this interplay between cancer cells and their metabolic environment. The research of Sarah’s lab has been published in high impact journals, including Nature, and is currently funded by multiple (inter)national grants and industry, which include an ERC consolidator grant. In 2020 Sarah has been awarded with the highly prestigious EMBO Gold Medal and a Baillet Latour Grant for Medical Research. Moreover, in 2021 Sarah received the Beug Prize for Metastasis Research.”
Marjolein Kes, Princess Maxima Center for Pediatric Oncology and Utrecht University
“Finding the Metabolic Achilles Heel of Pediatric Rhabdoid Tumors: Therapeutic Targeting of Aberrant Nucleotide Synthesis”
“My name is Marjolein Kes, and I am currently a first year, shared PhD student in the research groups of Jarno Drost (Princess Maxima Center for Pediatric Oncology) and Celia Berkers (Utrecht University). During my PhD, I will try to unravel metabolic vulnerabilities in rhabdoid childhood tumors, focusing on malignant rhabdoid tumors found in the kidney (MRTK) and brains (AT/RT) of young children. By combining the spheroid/organoid expertise of the Drost group with the metabolic expertise of the Berkers group, I hope to contribute to the survival and quality of life of children suffering from this now often incurable disease.“
Date and Location
Costs and registration
Costs: free of charge.
Registration: not needed.