Special seminar by Professor Wilbert Zwart

Hormone-driven cancers in time and space: from trials to mechanisms and back again

Professor Zwart has dedicated his scientific career to better understand hormonal cancers, and to improve outcome after hormonal treatment for cancer patients. His laboratory is based in Amsterdam where he runs a team of ten PhD students, six postdocs and two technicians. Professor Zwart acquired his PhD degree from The Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, after which he did Postdoctoral training in Cambridge, UK. In 2011, he started his independent research lab at the Netherlands Cancer Institute as a junior group leader, thereafter becoming Associate Professor in 2016 and Professor in 2018.

As the major field of interest, Professor Zwart’s laboratory studies the response to therapeutic interventions in prostate cancer, where there is a clear need for treatment-selective biomarkers and novel therapeutic strategies towards tailored therapy. The mission of his lab is the identification of novel therapeutic targets, development of novel therapeutic agents, and the discovery of new biomarkers, with the aim of personalized treatment of cancer patients. This is achieved through extensive international collaborations.

Host: Harri Itkonen

Selected recent publications:

Padrão N, Severson TM, Gregoricchio S, Guijarro A, Lutz C, Taranto D, Hutten S, Ligorio F, Persia A, Roest M, Sanders J, Song JY, Pires-Oliveira S, Donaldson Collier M, Horlings H, Pisciotta L, de Braud F, Vernieri C, Akkari L, Jonkers J, Nencioni A, Caffa I, Zwart W.: Fasting boosts breast cancer therapy efficacy via glucocorticoid activation. Nature 2026. PMID: 41372410.

Bianchi D, Borza R, De Zan E, Huelsz-Prince G, Gregoricchio S, Dekker M, Fish A, Mazouzi A, Kroese LJ, Linder S, Hernandez-Quiles M, Vermeulen M, Celie PHN, Krimpenfort P, Song JY, Zwart W, Wessels L, Nijman SMB, Perrakis A, Brummelkamp TR. Zincore, an atypical coregulator, binds zinc finger transcription factors to control gene expression. Science 2025. PMID: 40608935.

Gregoricchio S, Kojic A, Hoogstraat M, Schuurman K, Stelloo S, Severson TM, O’Mara TA, Droog M, Singh AA, Glubb DM, Wessels LFA, Vermeulen M, van Leeuwen FE, Zwart W. Endometrial tumorigenesis involves epigenetic plasticity demarcating non-coding somatic mutations and 3D-genome alterations. Genome Biol 2025. PMID: 40346709.

Linder S, Severson TM, van der Mijn KJC, Nevedomskaya E, Siefert JC, Stelloo S, Pomerantz MM, Freedman ML, van der Poel H, Jerónimo C, Henrique R, Bergman AM, Zwart W. Grade Group 1 Prostate Cancers Exhibit Tumor-defining Androgen Receptor-driven Programs. Eur Urol 2023. PMID: 37271632.