Specialization
Leukemia • Apoptosis • Single-cell sequencing • Drug resistance
Focus of research
- Elucidating leukemia cell plasticity in resistance to targeted therapy
- Identifying rational approaches to enhance the activity of the anti-cancer drug venetoclax
- Resolving acute myeloid leukemia complexity with single-cell multiomics and long-read sequencing
Dr. Rachel Thijssen is an Assistant Professor at Amsterdam UMC, the Netherlands, specializing in resistance to targeted therapy in blood cancer. She completed her Ph.D. at the Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, and conducted postdoctoral research at the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI) in Melbourne, Australia.
In 2023, Dr. Thijssen established her research group focused on understanding how hematopoietic cancer cells evade cell death, with a emphasize on venetoclax resistance in leukaemias using state-of-the-art techniques such as single-cell multiome (RNA+ATAC) sequencing and single-cell long-read sequencing. The ultimate goal is to develop improved treatment strategies for acute myeloid leukemia patients.