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Frans Schutgens has received the ZonMw Clinical Fellows grant, giving him the time to set up a line of research. Frans will be studying the heterogeneity of Wilms tumors and explore its clinical applications.

Wilms tumor (WT) is the most common form of kidney cancer in children. Most patients with a WT have a good prognosis. However, a small group of patients respond poorly to treatment, which can have lethal consequences. Remarkably, the WTs of these patients differ under the microscope from tumors where the therapy was successful: the 'bad' WTs contain more cells called 'blastema'. The precise function of these cells is unknown.

Targeting blastema to develop improved treatments

In his research, Frans will be collaborating with Jarno Drost at the Princess Maxima Center in Utrecht. They will study blastema using the latest techniques, aiming to find proteins that are only present in blastema. These proteins will then be used to isolate blastema from the tumors, allowing them to study these cells in a targeted manner and perform drug tests on them. Additionally, the proteins can serve as targets for the development of new medication. In this way, they ultimately hope to improve the prognosis of WTs with extensive presence of blastema.

The ZonMw Clinical Fellows grant

With the Clinical Fellows grant, ZonMw offers 18 research and specialized clinicians the opportunity to set up their first scientific research line. With this personal grant, they will conduct scientific research based on questions from the clinic for a period of 2 to 5 years. In this way, the researchers form a bridge between clinical practice and science.

Read more about the grant and the other winners on the .