Dr Marieke Essers  Heidelberg Institute for Stem Cell Technologies and Experimental Medicine (HI-STEM)

Dr Elisa Laurenti   Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, Department of Haematology, University of Cambridge

The host of this seminar is Marcus Buschbeck. 

Dr Marieke Essers' research journey started with the study Medical Biology at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. Upon receiving her Masters degree at the end of 1999, she joined the group of Dr Ir. Boudewijn Burgering at the division of Biomedical Genetics from the University Medical Center Utrecht (UMCU) in Utrecht. During her PhD work, she focused on the role of FoxO transcription factors in quiescence and stress responses in cells. For her postdoctoral training, Dr Essers then moved to Switzerland to join the Genetics and Stem Cell Lab of Dr Andreas Trumpp at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC) in Lausanne. Supported by an EMBO longterm fellowship, she discovered an unexpected but very interesting effect of the cytokine IFNα on quiescent hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). Since 2009 Dr Essers is running her own independent junior group at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the Heidelberg Institute for Stem Cell Technologies and Experimental Medicine (HI-STEM) in Heidelberg, Germany. Her group focuses on understanding the link of inflammation and the hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) compartment via the effect of pro-inflammatory cytokines on quiescent HSCs and their bone marrow niche. Investigating the effect of stress-induced pro-inflammatory cytokines on HSCs and their niche will allow to better understand what the mechanisms are by which HSCs are reassuring the successful restoration of the blood system and how HSCs are protected from pathogenic insults. In acknowledgement of the research achievements of her group, Dr Essers received the 2017 Chica and Heinz Schaller Research Award.

Prof Elisa Laurenti is a stem cell biologist who first trained in Switzerland for her PhD (Swiss Institute for Cancer Research, Lausanne) then in Canada (University Health Network, Toronto) as a post-doctoral fellow. She started her laboratory at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute and Department of Haematology of the University of Cambridge in 2014. In 2023, she was appointed as Professor of Stem Cells and Haematopoiesis. Her research aims to understand how blood stem cell (hematopoietic stem cell; HSC) function changes over a human lifetime to eventually improve treatment of blood diseases. To this end, her laboratory makes use of single cell technologies, both -omics and functional assays. In this context, she has charted the transcriptomic and functional composition of the human HSC pool at single cell resolution at all stages of human life (fetal: Nature, 2019; neonatal: Nature Comms, 2018; adult: Blood, 2022). Healthy ageing is another area of interest of her laboratory. Exploiting somatic mutations to track life histories of HSCs, she has uncovered a drastic loss of HSC clonality over the age of 70 (Nature, 2022), and how specific somatic mutation affect the innate immune system (BioRxiv, 2025). Finally, her laboratory studies how human HSC behave ex vivo to improve HSC expansion and gene therapy (Blood, 2024). In 2021, her outstanding contributions to the field of human haematopoiesis were recognised with the International Society for Experimental Hematology Janet Rowley award.

IJC Auditorium + Online
Inscripció