Maarten van Lohuizen, head of the Molecular Genetics Division at the NKI-AVL, has been appointed as professor of Biology and Epigenetic regulation of Normal and Cancerous Stemcells at the University of Amsterdam on behalf of the Association of the Netherlands Cancer Institute, effective April 1.
Before his appointment Maarten van Lohuizen was a professor of Physiological Chemistry at the University of Utrecht.
Maarten van Lohuizen focuses on the master switches that control cell and tissue development, and how these go wrong in cancer. His group is working on one set of these switches, the Polycomb-group proteins, which control cell fate and identity both during embryonic development and throughout the rest of your life. It is known that these proteins are involved in tumor formation. Understanding this in detail could lead to entirely new types of drugs that act in more precise ways than simply killing rapidly dividing cells.
Read more about Van Lohuizen research group.