THE VIRTUAL CHILD - Key Persons
Karin Straathof graduated with both a medical degree and BSc from Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her PhD at Baylor College of Medicine (Houston, USA) was on adoptive T cell immunotherapy for Epstein-Barr virus associated malignancies. She trained in paediatrics and subsequent subspecialty paediatric oncology in London and now is an honorary consultant paediatric oncologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital. With award of her Wellcome Trust Clinician Scientist Fellowship she has established her own research group at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and the UCL Cancer Institute. Her research interest is T cell-based immunotherapy for childhood solid tumours. Her work led to one of the first phase I clinical studies of CAR-T cell therapy for children with relapsed or refractory neuroblastoma. Her research group now develops cellular therapies incorporating advanced engineering approaches to achieve sustained activity against childhood solid tumours with further clinical studies due to open in 2022.
Marcel Kool started his career at Wageningen Agricultural University, where he obtained his PhD in the field of viruses in insects. He then moved to the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI). At the Academic Medical Center (AMC), Kool specialized in childhood cancer research, where he became a research group leader focusing on genetic alterations in brain tumors. In 2011, he moved to Heidelberg to do research on brain tumors in children at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and later at the Hopp Children's Cancer Center Heidelberg (KiTZ). Since 2019, Kool is leading, next to his research group at the KiTZ in Heidelberg, another research group at the Princess Máxima Center in Utrecht, where they focus on establishing brain tumor organoid models. He also plays an important role in the KiTZ-Máxima Twinning Program, not only as a member of the executive board, which coordinates the overall program between the two institutes, but he has also initiated and is leading several joint projects between KiTZ and Máxima. Moreover, working in both institutes has the advantage that Kool can easily bring other researchers and clinicians from both institutes in contact with each other for other potential collaborations and joint projects.
Hopp Children's Cancer Center (KiTZ), German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology, Utrecht, Netherlands Marcel Kool started his career at Wageningen Agricultural University, where he obtained his PhD in the field of viruses in insects. He then moved to the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI). At the Academic Medical Center (AMC), Kool […]
Dr. John Maris is Giulio D'Angio Professor of Pediatrics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He is a physician-scientist who has focused for over three decades on the childhood cancer neuroblastoma with the dual goals of improving patient outcomes and also using the disease as a model to understand cancer in general. His group has discovered all of the known neuroblastoma susceptibility genes and his group has also identified many of the oncogenic drivers of the disease. Dr. Maris has steadfastly sought to translate these discoveries to the clinic using precision medicine approaches and more recently by co-leading a multi-institutional St. Baldrick's Foundation-Stand Up to Cancer Pediatric Cancer Dream Team project to bring the fields of genomics and immunology together to combat childhood cancers, and more recently a Beau Biden Moonshot Center Award to extend this rapidly evolving area of research. Dr. Maris is an internationally recognized practicing pediatric oncologist who cares for children with refractory neuroblastoma from around the world, typically in the context of early phase clinical trials. Dr. Maris has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health and many other funding bodies. He currently holds a National Cancer Institute Outstanding Investigator Award and has received several prestigious awards including election into the American Society of Clinical Investigation, the Oski award for outstanding pediatric oncologists, and the Berwick award at Penn for melding basic and clinical teaching, and the William Osler Patient Oriented Research Award at Penn.
Michael D. Taylor, MD, PhD, is a paediatric neurosurgeon and senior scientist at the University of Toronto affiliated Hospital for Sick Children. His research centres on the molecular genetics of medulloblastoma and ependymoma, two of the most common malignant paediatric brain tumours. He has published over 375 peer-reviewed publications, many in high-impact journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, Cancer Cell, and Lancet Oncology. His publications have been cited over 45,000 times and his findings adopted to improve clinical practice. His group demonstrated that medulloblastoma is comprised of at least four distinct diseases (Journal Clin. Oncol., 2012; Cancer Cell, 2017; Nature, 2017) and that there is clinically significant heterogeneity in metastatic medulloblastomas (Nature, 2012, 2016; Nature Genetics, 2017). His team recently showed that cerebellar tumours are a disorder of early brain development (Nature, 2019), that CAR-T-cells are an effective pre-clinical treatment for Group 3 medulloblastoma and PFA ependymomas (Nature Medicine, 2020) and that PFA ependymomas have a unique metabolic program which leads to a phenotype that appears to be unique among mammalian cells (Cell, 2020).