My Research

Thijn Brummelkamp received his Msc in biology from the Free University in Amsterdam, in 1998. He did his graduate research at The Netherlands Cancer Institute in the laboratory of René Bernards and received his PhD cum laude from Utrecht University in 2003. After his PhD he was appointed as group leader (Whitehead Fellow) at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, USA. In 2011 his laboratory moved to the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam and he became adjunct PI at Center for Molecular Medicine (CeMM) in Vienna. Thijn has co-founded the biotech companies Haplogen GmbH (Vienna) and Scenic Biotech (Amsterdam).

He developed and applied technologies for genetics in cultured human cells (shRNA libraries and genetics in haploid mammalian cells) that are widely used in biomedical research. He identified a new class of intracellular receptors for highly pathogenic Ebola and Lassa viruses, studied the principles of synthetic lethal interactions in human cells, identified genes needed for glycosylation of alpha-dystroglycan and mutated in Walker-Warburg syndrome and assigned a function to the cylindromatosis tumor suppressor gene.

Awards

• 2015: Ammodo Award, Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW)
• 2013: EMBO Gold Medal
• 2012: Phoenix Pharmazie Wissenschaftspreis
• 2012: The Molecular Biosystems Early Career Award
• 2006: Kimmel Scholar Award, Sidney Kimmel Foundation for Cancer Research
• 2005: TR35: Elected as one of the world’s top young innovators by Technology Review Magazine
• 2004: NVBMB Award (Dutch association for biochemistry and molecular biology)
• 2003: Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek Award, for contributions on Functional Genomics

Key publications

1. Blomen, V. A., Májek, P., Jae, L. T., Bigenzahn, J. W., Nieuwenhuis, J., Staring, J., ... & Marceau, C. (2015). Gene essentiality and synthetic lethality in haploid human cells. Science, 350(6264), 1092-1096.
2. Brockmann, M., Blomen, V. A., Nieuwenhuis, J., Stickel, E., Raaben, M., Bleijerveld, O. B., ... & Brummelkamp, T. R. (2017). Genetic wiring maps of single-cell protein states reveal an off-switch for GPCR signalling. Nature, 546(7657), 307.
3. Carette, J. E., Raaben, M., Wong, A. C., Herbert, A. S., Obernosterer, G., Mulherkar, N., ... & Dal Cin, P. (2011). Ebola virus entry requires the cholesterol transporter Niemann–Pick C1. Nature, 477(7364), 340.
4. Nieuwenhuis, J., Adamopoulos, A., Bleijerveld, O. B., Mazouzi, A., Stickel, E., Celie, P., ... & Brummelkamp, T. R. (2017). Vasohibins encode tubulin detyrosinating activity. Science, eaao5676.
5. Staring, J., von Castelmur, E., Blomen, V. A., van den Hengel, L. G., Brockmann, M., Baggen, J., ... & Perrakis, A. (2017). PLA2G16 represents a switch between entry and clearance of Picornaviridae. Nature, 541(7637), 412.