Hosted by: Norihito Kawasaki

Prof. Yvette van Kooyk leads dendritic cell immunobiology group at Vrije university medical centre in Amsterdam.

Her work focuses on understanding the biology of lectin receptors expressed on human dendritic cells and exploiting their functions to combat cancer.

Her earlier work has identified DC-SIGN as a recognition receptor for various human pathogens such as HIV (Geijtenbeek TB et al, Cell, 2000) and tuberculosis (Geijtenbeek TB, J Exp Med, 2003). More recently, her group demonstrated that DC-SIGN is also involved in immune homeostasis (Garcia-Vallejo JJ et al, J Exp Med, 2014).

She is also developing anti-cancer vaccines that target human dendritic cells. For this purpose, her group has developed carbohydrate-bearing nano-particle that target DC-SIGN, in order to induce dendritic cell mediated immune response toward tumour (van Kooyk Y et al, Mol Immunol, 2013; Unger WW et al, J Control Release, 2012).