Monday, September 29, 2025 - 11:15 - Baltzerstrasse 4, Room C161
Prof. Dr. Colinda Scheele | KU Leuven, Department of Oncology | "How breast tissue defends itself: insights into cancer protection mechanisms"
Colinda Scheele is a group leader at VIB Center for Cancer Biology since June 2020, and an Assistant Professor at KU Leuven, Department of Oncology since 2021. Colinda received a Master in Biomedical Sciences from Utrecht University. She performed her PhD research (cum laude) in the lab of Prof. Jacco van Rheenen (at the Hubrecht Institute (Utrecht) and the Netherlands Cancer Institute (Amsterdam)). During her PhD, she made important contributions to the field of mammary gland biology, as I discovered the location, behavior, and fate of mammary stem cells during pubertal branching morphogenesis (Scheele*, Hannezo* et al Nature, 2017; Hannezo*, Scheele* et al Cell, 2017; Corominas-Murtra*, Scheele* et al PNAS, 2020). During these years, she pioneered quantitative lineage tracing and intravital microscopy of diverse tissues studying tissue heterogeneity, metastasis and therapy response (Scheele et al Trends in Cancer, 2016; Scheele et al Nat Rev Methods Primers 2022).
Building on these discoveries and unique technologies, she started her laboratory in 2020 at VIB Center for Cancer Biology and in 2021 at KU Leuven, Dpt of Oncology, where her team focuses on the interaction dynamics between cancer cells and their host (tissue). The team develops and uses state-of-the-art methods, including intravital imaging (Messal et al JOMBN 2021), organoid technology (Caruso et al Front Physiol 2022), and a unique biobank of orthotopically transplanted patient-derived xenograft models (Hutten et al Cancer Cell, 2023), to study the origins and dynamics of primary and metastatic cancer in real-time in a near-to-native setting. They developed an image-guided spatial sequencing method (van der Leun et al Nature Chemical Biology 2021) and by using this method they discovered that healthy breast tissue surrounding early tumor lesions carries oncogenic mutations, despite being untransformed (Hutten et al The Journal of Pathology 2024). The team recently discovered that host breast tissue remodeling plays a key role in protecting us from breast tumor initiation in the presence of oncogenic driver mutations (Ciwinska et al Nature 2024).
The research of Colinda’s lab is funded by national and international grants, including FWO, Stichting tegen Kanker, EOS, NIH, and ERC. Colinda received several awards and prizes including the BAEF alumni award (2024), Beug Prize for Metastasis research (2023), the FEBS excellence award (2022), the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Prize (2020) and the PhD of the year award (2017).
