With my research I aim to improve prevention, early diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Hereby I focus on the establishment of minimally invasive approaches for early diagnosis and therapy monitoring of cancer patients, using multi-omics approaches in liquid biopsies of cancer patients. 

I have a major interest in unraveling the genetic basis of cancer in (pediatric and adult) patients with a presumed predisposition. I focus on both highly penetrant germline variants and polygenic risk scores.

As this reveals variants of unknown significance, I am setting up assays for in vivo functional assessment, using zebrafish as model organism. Hereby, I am studying DNA repair pathways involved in cancer predisposition in zebrafish and evaluating if zebrafish could be a good organism for testing cancer therapies. In this context I also initiated the development of a zebrafish xenograft platform to predict tumor response.

I hope that my research will confer to patient centered treatment.