Michiel Pegtel PhD. As an undergraduate student Michiel studied early anti-cancer vaccine development at the National Cancer Institute (Bethesda, USA). He subsequently obtained a PhD in Immunology at Tufts University Medical School (Boston, USA) where he was one of the first to apply gene-set enrichment analysis on expression data from human cancers with collaborators at the Broad Institute (Cambridge, USA). As a post-doc at the Netherlands Cancer Institute (Amsterdam) he studied cell polarity mechanisms in migrating cancer cells.
In 2011 Michiel was awarded the Beijerinck Premium from the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences for his discovery of EV-mediated microRNA-transfer. He now heads the Exosomes Research group (ERG) at Amsterdam University medical centers (AUMC). The multidisciplinary ERG team focuses on i) the molecular dynamics of EV biogenesis and release ii) RNA sorting into EVs and iii) liquid biopsy strategies to predict response to therapy in patients with cancer. Michiel is an inventor of multiple patents and co-founded a molecular diagnostics start-up.
In his current position, he serves as daily board of the pathology department, is the director of the Liquid Biopsy Center at Cancer Center Amsterdam and is member of the ADORE board, an initiative that connects cancer research with neuroscience at the AUMC campus.
