Leukemia stem cells, acute myeloid leukemia

• The identification and pre-clinical validation of therapeutic targets specifically eliminating leukemic stem cells (LSC).
• Targeting the transcriptome and epigenome to eliminate therapy resistant acute myeloid leukemia (stem) cells.
• Mechanisms associated with sensitivity to retinoic acid-driven differentiation in leukemia.

Linda Smit is Assistant Professor at the Hematology department at the Amsterdam UMC. The overall aim of her group is the identification of efficient therapeutic strategies that eliminate LSCs and/or minimal residual disease (MRD), thereby improving future clinical therapies and increasing leukemia patient survival rates

Linda Smit graduated in Medical Biology from the Free University, Amsterdam in 1992 and received her PhD in 1998 at the department of Immunology of the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam on the subject of “Signaling pathways in B lymphocytes”. In 1999 she started working as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Hans Clevers at the Hubrecht Laboratory in Utrecht where she worked on the involvement of Wnt signalling in the development of colon carcinoma. In 2004 she started a postdoctoral fellowship at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in the laboratory of Prof. Rene Bernards. In the Bernards lab, Dr. Smit has studied the characteristics and mechanism of drug resistance of breast cancer stem cells by the use of functional genomic approaches. From 2008, she became Assistant Professor at the Hematology department of the VU Medical Centre, where she is leading her independent research group, working on the identification of therapeutics for the treatment of AML. Moreover, she is leading (together with hematologist Dr. J.J.W.M Janssen) the molecular diagnostic team of the department of Hematology at Amsterdam UMC, location VUmc.