Karin de Visser

Prof. dr. Karin E. de Visser obtained her PhD at the Division of Immunology at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam in the field of tumor immunotherapy. From 2003-2005 she worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Prof. dr. Lisa Coussens at the University of California, San Francisco, where she developed an active interest in the interplay between the adaptive and innate immune system during cancer development. In 2005 she joined the laboratory of Prof. dr. Jos Jonkers 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 senior group leader at the Division of Tumor Biology & Immunology at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, alongside her appointment as group leader at Oncode Institute and as professor of Experimental Immunobiology of Cancer at Leiden University Medical Center.

The overall goal of her research is to understand by which mechanisms the immune system influences metastatic breast cancer. Her research group identified how mammary tumors induce a systemic inflammatory response that facilitates metastasis formation (Coffelt et al. Nature 2015) and how the genetic make-up of breast cancer dictates systemic pro-metastatic inflammation (Wellenstein et al. Nature 2019). Through mechanistic understanding of the crosstalk between the immune system and cancer she aims to contribute to the design of novel immunomodulatory strategies to fight metastatic breast cancer. Karin de Visser received an ERC consolidator grant in 2014 and a prestigious NWO-VICI grant in 2019, 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.