Roos Masereeuw

Since July 2015, Roos Masereeuw is full professor of Experimental Pharmacology at Utrecht Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences in The Netherlands. She received her MSc in Biopharmaceutical Sciences from Leiden University in December 1991, and a PhD from Radboud University in Nijmegen in January 1997. This PhD program and a postdoc period were partly performed at National Institute for Environmental Sciences (NIEHS/NIH), Research Triangle Park, NC, USA. Dr. Masereeuw also visited the NIEHS/NIH institute Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (ME, USA) as principal investigator in 1997, 1998, 2010 and 2014. In November 1996, she joined the Dept. of Pharmacology and Toxicology at Radboudumc as assistant professor, which she combined with an appointment as reviewer of human clinical pharmacokinetics at the Dutch Medicines Evaluation Board (30%; until 2000). In July 2002, she was appointed as associate professor at Radboudumc after obtaining an NWO-ASPASIA award. In 2009, she received the Dutch Pharmacological Society (NVF) Schering-Plough Pharmacology Award, in 2010 the Galenus Research prize and in 2015 she was elected Fellow of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists. She is currently president of the Dutch Pharmacological Society.

Research

Research in the Masereeuw group is focused on understanding the pathways that can be pharmacologically triggered to enhance repair and regeneration processes after organ injury, aiming at elucidating novel bio-inspired therapeutic strategies. Her research can be roughly divided in two lines:

1. Disease modeling – Aims are to unravel the interactions between (therapeutic) molecules and biological systems in organ systems. For this humanized in vitro systems are being applied that functionally mimic (patients) organs, which includes the use of innovative technologies for 3-dimensional organ cultures such as microfluidics (organs-on-chip technology). These experimental tools should aid in translating molecular interactions into therapeutic effects. Target organs currently involve (but are not restricted to) the kidney and the intestine, individually and combined, allowing studying the interaction between two organs when one of them fails.

2. Regenerative (nephro-)pharmacology – Aims are to develop novel therapeutic strategies to accelerate organ function recovery during failure and to gain insight in processes that determine the excretion of metabolic wastes and drugs by the kidneys to develop novel interventions for renal disease. The past years, novel renal tubular excretion pathways were identified, as well as regulatory pathways towards the transporters involved that can be pharmacologically triggered to improve function during kidney failure. The Masereeuw group has developed unique, patented, human renal cell lines with a high predictive value for drug and waste product transport and metabolism. These cell lines are used in the development of a bioartificial kidney, a kidney-on-a-chip device suitable for in vitro toxicity testing of chemical entities and drugs in development, and for studying the renal tubular secretion and reabsorption machinery.

More information can be found on her staff page