Karin de Visser - Biography#

Dr. Karin E. de Visser obtained her PhD at the Division of Tumor Biology & Immunology at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam in the field of tumor immunotherapy. From 2003-2005 she worked as a postdoctoral fellow of the Dutch Cancer Society in the lab of Dr. Lisa Coussens in the Cancer Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco, where she developed an active interest in the interplay between adaptive and innate immune system during cancer development. She identified a novel promoting role for B lymphocytes during inflammation-associated skin carcinogenesis (De Visser et al. Cancer Cell 2005). In 2005 she joined the laboratory of Dr. Jos Jonkers at the Division of Molecular Biology at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, where she expanded her research direction into the field of inflammation and mammary carcinogenesis, using conditional mouse models. Currently she is group leader at the Division of Immunology at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. The overall goal of her research is to understand by which mechanisms the immune system influences breast cancer metastasis and response to conventional anti-cancer therapies. Through mechanistic understanding of the crosstalk between the immune system and cancer cells she aims to contribute to the design of novel immunomodulatory strategies to fight metastatic breast cancer and to increase the efficacy of anti-cancer therapy response. Recently, her lab discovered that mammary tumors induce a systemic inflammatory response involving gamma delta T cells and immunosuppressive neutrophils to facilitate metastasis formation (Coffelt et al. Nature 2015). Karin de Visser received a prestigious ERC consolidator grant in 2014, she is recipient of the 2015 Metastasis Research Prize of the Beug Foundation and in 2016 she was selected as a member of the EMBO young investigator program. Please have a look at her website http://www.nki.nl/divisions/immunology/de-visser-k-group/ for more information