Rene Bernards
The Netherlands Cancer Institute
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Primary Section: 41, Medical Genetics, Hematology, and Oncology Membership Type:
International Member
(elected 2020)
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Biosketch
René Bernards is a professor of molecular carcinogenesis at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam. He studied medical biology at the University of Amsterdam, obtained his PhD in 1984 from Leiden University in molecular oncology. After this, he became a postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge and joined Massachusetts General Hospital as an assistant professor in 1988. In 1992 he moved to his current position at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. His laboratory identified the FDA-approved combination of a BRAF inhibitor and an EGFR inhibitor as effective for the treatment of BRAF mutant colon cancer. He also developed the first clinically used gene expression test for early breast cancer prognosis: MammaPrint, which has helped over 150,000 women in optimizing their treatment decision.
Amongst his honors are the Pezcoller Foundation award, the Ernst Bertner Award for Cancer Research from the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and the ESMO Lifetime Achievement Award. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the AACR Academy.
Research Interests
Dr. Bernards' current work focuses on the identification of novel combination therapies for cancer. One aspect of this work is directed at the exploitation of senescence for cancer therapy. A second aspect is the identification of vulnerabilities of drug-resistant cancer cells.
