Martijn Verdoes

Martijn Verdoes obtained his PhD in Organic Chemistry from Leiden University under the supervision of Prof. H.S. Overkleeft and Prof. G.A. van der Marel in 2008. His thesis work mainly focused on the design and synthesis of activity-based inhibitors and probes to study proteasome function. In 2009, Martijn obtained an NWO Rubicon fellowship to join the lab of prof. M. Bogyo at the Stanford School of Medicine, where he developed quenched activity-based probes (qABPs) for non-invasive imaging of cancer. Inspired by the observation that his qABPs got activated by specific immune cells in tumors he joined the Department of Tumor Immunology at the Radboud Institute for Molecular Life Sciences (RIMLS), Radboudumc in 2013. Since 2016, he is leading a multidisciplinary research group using chemistry to study and manipulate the immune system in cancer. He was awarded an Institute for Chemical Immunology (ICI) Tenure Track Fellowship, as well as an ERC Starting Grant “CHEMCHECK” and in 2019 he secured a tenured assistant professor position. His lab aims to develop strategies for chemistry-based precision immunotherapy using nanomaterials, small molecules and antibody targeted approaches to i) induce a tumor-specific immune response and ii) prime the tumor (microenvironment) for tumor-specific effector immune cells.