Ms Florijn Dekkers

During her PhD (2010-2015, UMC Utrecht, the Netherlands) Florijn Dekkers developed methods to individualize cystic fibrosis (CF) treatment. She utilized the intestinal organoid culture technology to develop an in vitro functional assay to accurately measure the function of CFTR, the protein mutated in CF (Dekkers et al., Nat. Med., 2013), and provided proof for the use of this model to identify drug-responsive CF subjects (Dekkers et al., Sci. Transl. Med. 2016). This assay has been implemented in the Dutch healthcare system and is currently being used to select CF patients with rare mutations for approved targeted CF therapies. She continued as a postdoc in Melbourne (2016-2017, WEHI) where she established a robust mouse mammary organoid model (Jamieson & Dekkers, Development, 2017) and successfully engineered human breast tumors from normal breast organoids by CRISPR/Cas9. She now works at the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology (Utrecht, the Netherlands) and Hubrecht Institute (Utrecht, the Netherlands) and develops innovative approaches (Dekkers et al, Nature protocols, 2019) to visualize cancer biology in a unique way to thereby better understand the progression of cancer and the mechanism-of-action of anticancer therapy, such as immunotherapy with engineered T cells.