Christopher Heeschen

Christopher Heeschen

Christopher Heeschen obtained his MD in 1997 from the University of Hamburg, Germany. After three years of clinical training in Internal Medicine, he joined the laboratory of John P. Cooke at Stanford University in 1999, where he worked on basic mechanism of angiogenesis and vasculogenesis in the setting of tissue ischemia and tumor growth. After spending two productive years in Stanford, he became Staff Scientist at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main, where he continued studying stem cell biology in Cardiovascular Medicine before becoming nominated Professor of Experimental Oncology and Transplantation at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich, Germany, in 2004. In January 2009, he moved with his lab to the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) in Madrid, Spain, where he held the position of a Senior Group Leader in the Molecular Pathology Programme. Since 2014 he is leading the Centre for Stem Cells in Cancer & Ageing at the Barts Cancer Institute, London, UK. His group is studying the dynamics of pancreatic cancer stem cells and their microenvironment using state-of-the-art technology and aims to eventually identify more effective treatments regimens for patients with poor clinical outcome, e.g. pancreatic cancer. Christopher Heeschen’s groups has discovered several key molecular mechanisms for stem cell function, differentiation, invasion, and trafficking as well as demonstrated a distinct subpopulation of cancer stem cells with the crucial relevance of cancer stem cells for metastasis and drug resistance. His work has been published in more than 135 manuscripts in top-ranking journals including N Engl J Med, Nat Med, Nat Methods, Cancer Cell, Cell Stem Cell, J Exp Med, J Clin Invest, Lancet, and PNAS and has been cited more than 19,000 times over the past 10 years (current h-index 55).