Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology, Utrecht, the Netherlands
Utrecht, Netherlands
Marcel Kool, Ph.D., is a cancer biologist at the Hopp Children’s Cancer Center at the NCT Heidelberg (KiTZ) and German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, Germany. He is deputy of the division of Pediatric Neurooncology headed by Prof. Dr. Stefan M. Pfister and group leader of the Preclinical Research Group in this division. Since April 2011 he is working at the DKFZ in Heidelberg and since September 2019 he started a second research group on pediatric brain tumors at the Princess Maxima Center for Pediatric Oncology in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Marcel Kool’s expertise is the genomics of pediatric brain tumors. He and the teams in Heidelberg and Utrecht aim to (1) characterize each brain tumor entity in full detail at the genomic and epigenomic level in order to identify clinically relevant subgroups; (2) to find the oncogenic driving events in these tumors and the best therapeutic targets; (3) to find diagnostic, prognostic and/or predictive biomarkers for these tumors and their subgroups for use in clinical settings; (4) to build a large repertoire of molecularly characterized tumor models representing all the different molecular subtypes of pediatric brain tumors and use them for preclinical studies in order to translate the genomic findings into new therapeutic options. Overall, Marcel Kool has co-authored >230 publications of which >150 only in the last five years. Several of these recent papers are landmark papers in the field of pediatric neurooncology describing the identification of new molecular entities and/or molecular subtypes of known entities with their respective oncogenic drivers and mutational landscapes.
