Sebastiaan van Heesch

Sebastiaan van Heesch, PhD, is a senior PI at Princess Máxima Center for Paediatric Oncology (Utrecht, The Netherlands), Junior Oncode Investigator at Oncode Institute (The Netherlands), and vice chair of the Therapeutic Vaccines workstream at Oncode Accelerator—a Dutch nationwide program that aims to accelerate the preclinical development of cancer vaccines. Trained at Utrecht University and the Hubrecht Institute for Developmental Biology and Stem Cell Research (PhD; 2014), he next pursued his career as a postdoctoral scientist and EMBO fellow at the Max-Delbrück-Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin (2014-2020). At the Princess Máxima Center, Europe’s largest paediatric cancer research hospital, his lab develops advanced sequencing, proteomics, and computational approaches to characterise the cancer dark proteome and explore dark antigens as targets for cellular immunotherapies and cancer vaccines. Sebastiaan co-initiated and co-leads the international TransCODE consortium, and serves on the executive committee of the HUPO non-canonical proteome project (HUPO-ncPP), both aimed at establishing standards for the discovery and annotation of the dark proteome.