University of Leeds
Leeds, England, United Kingdom
Heiko Wurdak carried out his PhD study on ‘Neural Stem Cells and TGFbeta signalling’ in the laboratory of Prof Sommer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Switzerland. He became an EMBO long-term fellow (2 years), and subsequently an AACR postdoctoral fellow working in chemical biology/functional genomics in the laboratory of Prof Schultz at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), and as a visiting scientist at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF), La Jolla, USA. From 2011, he established the ‘Stem Cell and Brain Tumour Group’ (SCBT; https://twitter.com/scbt_research) at the University Leeds and obtained a tenured Group Leader position in 2016. SCBT is a scientist-clinician-partnership (co-lead by neurosurgeon Ryan Mathew) and we are passionate about establishing preclinical models to incorporate the specific disease characteristics of the individual patient. We investigate cancer cell vulnerabilities and pathophysiological mechanisms at the stem cell and tumour interface through interdisciplinary collaborations using patient-derived cells, organoids, and in vivo brain tumour models.
