Jacco van Rheenen Wins STEM CELLS Young Investigator Award

Durham, NC (PRWEB) December 10, 2013

Jacco van Rheenen, Ph.D., of the Hubrecht Institute in The Netherlands has been named the winner of the 8th Annual STEM CELLS Young Investigator Award for his investigation on how healthy and tumorigenic tissues are derived from and maintained by cancer stem cells, how tumor cells disseminate from primary tumors and how these disseminated tumor cells grow out in distant organs.

The STEM CELLS Young Investigator Award honors a young scientist who is a principal author of a significant research paper published in STEM CELLS. Dr. van Rheenen was selected as this years winner for his paper, Brief Report: Intravital Imaging of Cancer Stem Cell Plasticity in Mammary Tumors.

This prize does not only inspire me to keep doing this type of research, but it inspires and acknowledges all the people in my lab who worked very hard on this project, said Dr. van Rheenen.

Dr. van Rheenen and his team developed and utilized the latest imaging techniques to visualize the adaptive properties of the few cells within the large population of non-metastasizing and differentiated cells that might maintain the heterogeneous tumor and metastasize.

There are still many questions about how breast cancers evolve over time and how cancer stem cells may be involved. The outstanding study by Dr. van Rheenens laboratory demonstrates unequivocally, for the first time, that a small fraction of breast cancer stem cells are responsible for clonal expansion to not only generate the differentiated tumor but also to replicate themselves. The use of the confetti colors to perform the lineage tracing in this study is truly elegant, and I congratulate our Young Investigator Award winner on this important accomplishment, said Jan A. Nolta, Ph.D., Editor of STEM CELLS.

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Full Citation: Zomer, A., Ellenbroek, S. I. J., Ritsma, L., Beerling, E., Vrisekoop, N. and Van Rheenen, J. (2013), Brief Report: Intravital Imaging of Cancer Stem Cell Plasticity in Mammary Tumors. STEM CELLS, 31: 602606. doi: 10.1002/stem.1296

Paper URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/stem.1296/abstract#fn3

About the Author: Jacco van Rheenen was originally trained in a variety of imaging techniques during his PhD with Dr. Kees Jalink at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. He was among the first to optimize imaging and develop software to quantitatively measure FRET on confocal microscopes. During his PhD in the lab of Dr. Jalink and as postdoc in the lab of Dr. Sonnenberg (Netherlands Cancer Institute) he used several microscopy techniques to study lipid signaling in tumor cells. In order to broader his scales, he obtained a KWF fellowship to do a postdoc in the United States in the lab of Dr. John Condeelis. There he extended his imaging experience by imaging mammary tumors intravitally including two-photon microscopy and became an expert in the field of intravital FRET imaging. In 2008 he was appointed as group leader at the Hubrecht Institute, where he utilizes his imaging techniques to visualize processes that are required for the metastasis of mammary tumor cells in living animals. In 2009, he was awared a VIDI grant and a research grant from the Dutch Cancer Society.

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Jacco van Rheenen Wins STEM CELLS Young Investigator Award