Manchester Breast Centre (MBC) External Seminar Series, sponsored by Breast Cancer Now
Monday 15 April 2024, 3:00pm – 4:00pm
Prof Christine Desmedt, Katholieke Universiteit (KU) Leuven, Belgium
Title: “Tissue Donation Programs to Accelerate Metastasis Research”
Hosted by: Rob Clarke
Live seminar at: OCRB Lecture Theatre, Oglesby Cancer Research Building, 555 Wilmslow Rd, Manchester M20 4GJ
Christine Desmedt is an Associate Professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven, Leuven), where she is heading the Laboratory for Translational Breast Cancer Research since 2018.
She received her bio-engineer degree in Cells and Genes Biotechnology from the KU Leuven in 2000 and worked then at the Jules Bordet Institute where she did her PhD and PostDoc under the mentorship of Christos Sotiriou and Martine Piccart.
At the KU Leuven, besides her teaching duties and the coordinator of the Cancer Programme of the Doctoral School Cancer, she is committed, together with her team, to perform excellent multi-disciplinary research to further personalize breast cancer treatment for and with patients with breast cancer.
The main research areas of the Lab are the molecular characterization of breast cancer, including the unraveling of metastatic progression, the better understanding of rarer cancer subtypes such as lobular breast tumors, the identification of mechanisms of treatment efficacy and the impact of patient adiposity on breast cancer biology. She is also the co-leader of the Breast Cancer group of the Leuven Cancer Institute (LKI) with Prof. Dr. Hans Wildiers. She is also co-developer and co-leader of the breast cancer research autopsy program at UZ/KU Leuven with Prof. Dr. Giuseppe Floris. She is the co-founder and co-coordinator of the European Lobular Breast Cancer Consortium (www.elbcc.org elbcc.org) together with Prof. P. Derksen (University of Utrecht, The Netherlands) and Prof. Dr. A. Salomon (Institut Curie, Paris, France), and the vice-president of the COST Action CA 19138 LOBSTERPOT, entirely devoted to lobular breast cancer research.