On Thursday Dec 14, 2023 our colleague Victor Baart successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled ‘Lighting Up Cancer Aggressiveness: Targeting the urokinase plasminogen activator receptor for intraoperative optical imaging’.
In this thesis, uPAR was studied as target for fluorescence guided surgery (FGS) and uPAR-targeting FGS tracers were developed and compared in various cancer models. uPAR (CD-87) was discovered by Vassalli et al. in 1985 was first known primarily for its role in fibrinolysis, but it was already in 1991, that Ossowski et al. showed that uPAR is involved in various other non-proteolytic processes related to cancer, such as cell migration, cell cycle regulation, and cell adhesion.
Now, approximately 30 years later Victor’s thesis showed that the latter feature can be exploited to assist in intraoperative tumor identification. The promotion team consisting of prof. Koos Burggraaf, dr Alexander Vahrmeijer and dr Kees Sier are very proud of Victor. They also wish to thank the opposition committee consisting of prof. Sophie Hernot, dr Danielle Cohen, dr Stijn Keereweer, prof. Paul Quax, prof. Hein Verspaget, prof. Marius Staring and prof. Robert Rißmann.
