Group Leader at VIB Center for Cancer Biology and University of Leuven, Belgium
Prof. Lambrechts was trained as an engineer at the University of Leuven where he also pursued his PhD. He joined the VIB as an independent Group Leader in 2008. He holds a Kuang-Piu professorship chair at Zhejiang University and has won several awards, including the Karel-Lodewijk Award for Human Medicine; the Galenus Prize for Pharmacology; the AstraZeneca Award for Translational Research and the Agilent Thought Leadership Award. His expertise is focused on tackling important questions in oncology by translating genome-scale data sets into clinically applicable knowledge. Investigations are based on the application of cutting-edge sequencing technologies and bioinformatics, and on the seamless integration of genomic data sets with clinical and fundamental biological information to generate novel insights and potent biomarkers for the field of oncology. Prof. Lambrechts lab has developed a special interest in studying the mechanisms underlying genomic scars and developing biomarkers for them. He already succeeded in developing a novel microsatellite instability marker. This test was commercialised by Biocartis NV as the IdyllaTM MSI Test and recently also received FDA approval. His group also developed with the gynaeco-oncology team at the University Hospital Leuven an academic HRD test to guide treatment of patients with high-grade serous ovarian cancer towards PARP inhibition. In recent years, Prof. Lambrechts lab has developed a special interest in dissecting the tumor microenvironment using single-cell technologies. He was among the first to characterize the lung tumor stroma (Lambrechts et al., Nat Med 2018) and in comparing stromal cells residing in tumor versus normal tissues across cancer types (Qian et al. Cell Res 2020). Currently, he is focusing his team’s efforts on studying changes in the tumor microenvironment during checkpoint immunotherapy at single-cell level (Bassez et al. Nat Med 2021). He is also applying the most recent spatial single-cell technologies to tumor tissues exposed to checkpoint immunotherapy to better understand how response and/or resistance to treatment is spatially embedded within the tumor microenvironment (Franken et al. Immunity 2024). Since 2015, Prof. Lambrechts has been Director of the VIB Center for Cancer Biology in Leuven, Belgium.
