Karin De Visser

Biography

Throughout his career, he have focused on the intriguing and paradoxical role of the immune system in cancer and metastasis formation. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2002 at the Division of Immunology at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdamin the lab of Prof. Dr. Ada Kruisbeek, where he studied the impact of T cell tolerance on tumor-immunotherapy. In 2002, he was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship from the Dutch Cancer Society to pursue his postdoctoral training in the lab of Prof. Dr. Lisa Coussens in the Cancer Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco. There he developed an active interest in the interplay between adaptive and innate immune system during cancer development. They published one of the first mechanistic reports regarding the pro-tumor functions of B lymphocytes in a mouse model of epithelial carcinogenesis. In 2005 he joined the laboratory of Dr. Jos Jonkers at the Division of Molecular Biology at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, where he expanded his research direction into the field of inflammation and mammary tumorigenesis, using conditional mouse models. Currently he run his own independent research group in the Division of Immunology at the NKI focusing on the role of the innate and adaptive immune system in breast cancer development, metastasis formation and therapy response.

Research Interest

Interplay between adaptive and innate immune system during cancer development.