Year of birth: 1957

Wikipedia

BIOGRAPHY

Laura van ‘t Veer is a molecular biologist specialised in personalized medicine and inventor of the MammaPrint tool for measuring the benefits of adjuvant chemotherapy in patients with breast cancer. After the degree in molecular biology at the University of Amsterdam and the PhD at the University of Leiden, she began working at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, in Amsterdam, in the 1990s. In that center, van ‘t Veer was the first molecular biologist working on introducing the molecular techniques within the clinical setting and then became Head of Diagnostic Oncology.

In the early 2000s, she and colleagues discovered a 70-gene signature for distinguishing patients with a poor or positive prognosis, that therefore would take advantage from adjuvant therapy. Later, van ‘t Veer co-founded the Agendia company and commercialised the 70-gene signature under the brand Mammaprint. This was the first gene-expression test to be approved by FDA in 2007 and entered the ESMO guidelines for the treatment of breast cancer in 2015. Nowadays, she is leader of the Breast Oncology Program and co-leader of the Breast Oncology Program at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, in California, in the United States.