Over the last past summer, geneticist Thijn Brummelkamp was granted this award for his groundbreaking and inspiring science, which contributes to the search for new medicines to treat illnesses like cancer and infectious diseases. Researchers around the globe benefit from the techniques that he has devised, which allows them to study gene function in human DNA.
Through creative experiments with DNA, he entices human cells to reveal their secrets. “It often astonishes me how much we still don’t know about our own cells, and how much there is left to discover. It’s quite wonderful to me. I want to understand what went wrong in tumor cells, and translate that into new treatments.”
Over the past twenty years, researchers from all over the world have used Brummelkamp’s technique to inactivate genes in nearly all studies searching for new cancer medicines. He also unraveled the way the ebola virus makes its way into human cells. The first effective treatment for Ebola, developed later by other researchers, turns out to target this specific pathway.
More recently, he surprised the world of science (and himself) by figuring out why chemotherapy kills cancer cells. For these two findings, as well as many others, he used a different ingenious technique that allows one to study the function of human genes on a large scale.
His research group will use the prize money to investigate what this new finding about cell death could mean for cancer (patients). They also intend to pose completely new questions about how cells work.
Truly groundbreaking research cannot be planned out in advance, he emphasizes. “All my important findings result from funds for free, creative research, which allows for new directions to unknown destinations. That gives you the freedom to push boundaries. Which is why it is so wonderful that I can freely allocate this prize.”
Besides his roles as group leader and scientific director of the Netherlands Cancer Institute, Thijn is Professor of Experimental Genetics at Utrecht University and UMC Utrecht, and affiliated with Oncode Institute.