Micha (M.) Nethe PhD

Training

In January 2011 I received my PhD degree in the laboratory of Prof. Peter Hordijk at Sanquin Research and obtained a personal grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) to move to the laboratory of Prof. Ian Macara at the University of Virginia in the USA to work on mammary gland biology (Rubicon-award). In October 2013 I obtained another personal NWO grant (Veni award) to continue my work on breast cancer in the laboratory of Prof.Jos Jonkers at the NKI on the role of E-cadherin in breast cancer. During these studies I became intrigued by the marked accumulation of E-cadherin in erythroid-defined hematopoietic malignancies in bone marrow and obtained in September 2017 a JoghemVanLoghem fellowship, granting me a PI-position and a PhD-student to initiate this line of research at Sanquin Research, Landsteiner lab/AMC.

Research interests

The incidence of anaemia development, which reflects a decrease in red blood cell (RBC) production below a healthy threshold, increases upon aging and is estimated to affect a third of the global population. Epidemiologic studies report that anaemia in elderly accelerates cognitive decline, contributes to cardiovascular diseases and in addition reduces the quality of life. Anaemia is also a hallmark of hematopoietic malignancies like myeloid dysplasia syndrome (MDS). MDS reflects a heterogeneous group of hematopoietic neoplasms in the bone marrow, diagnosed in ~500 patients a year in the Netherlands, that harbors the potential to develop into acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). Nevertheless MDS patients primarily decease due impaired treatment responses to the developed anaemia. Therefore improved insights into anaemia development are needed to develop novel treatment options and improve clinical outcome. My research group aims to identify treatable causes of anaemia by improving our insights into the regulation of red blood cell formation. Since the start of my group in January 2018, we set-up two research lines to improve our insights into RBC deregulation during anaemia formation “Identification of the role of E-cadherin during haematopoiesis in human bone marrow” and “Genome-wide screening using Crispr-Cas9 to identify novel critical regulators of erythropoiesis”.   

                                                                      

Technology

To improve our understanding into erythropoiesis in healthy and malignant bone marrow my research group uses optimized in vitro culture systems to interrogate erythropoiesis in healthy and malignant human-derived bone marrow tissue which we combine with state-of-the-art in vivo models. In addition we are using innovative imaging techniques such as 8-color-immunofluorescence and intravital imaging as well as advanced biomolecular techniques such as CrisprCas9 technology.

Resume

 

2018 – present	Group Leader at Sanquin Research
2013 – 2018	Senior post-doc, Department of Molecular Pathology, Netherlands Cancer Institute (Chief; Jos Jonkers)
2011 – 2013	Post-doc, Department of Cell and Development Biology, University of Charlottesville, Charlottesville, USA (Chief; Ian Macara)
2005 – 2010	PhD, Department of Molecular Cell Biology, Sanquin (Chief; Peter Hordijk)