Four Oncode Investigators have been awarded highly competitive Cancer Grand Challenges grants. This exceptional international recognition highlights the strength of Dutch cancer research and unlocks substantial new funding to accelerate fundamental discoveries toward tangible impact for patients.

Meet Tessy and see how she helps researchers explore where their discoveries can lead.

Four Oncode Investigators have been awarded highly competitive Cancer Grand Challenges grants. This exceptional international recognition highlights the strength of Dutch cancer research and unlocks substantial new funding to accelerate fundamental discoveries toward tangible impact for patients.

Meet Chung, our Financial Controller who keeps our financial processes clear and consistent.

A €1.5 million Vici grant will support new research into epigenetic plasticity in prostate cancer, aiming to uncover mechanisms that drive disease progression and open the door to more precise and durable treatment options.

Meet Anoushka and see how she helps ideas, people and programmes come together.

Oncode Institute spin-off Omivera, built around the CellEKT chemical proteomics platform, has secured a seed investment from UNIIQ, an investment fund focused on the proof-of-concept phase, aiming to bring innovations to the market faster. 

Cancer research often advances through ideas that are complex, and require sustained effort over time - driven by people with a strong sense of purpose. In this interview, Madelon Maurice, professor of molecular cell biology at University Medical Centre Utrecht (UMC Utrecht) and Oncode Institute investigator, and Maureen Spit, Vice President of Research at Laigo Bio, reflect on what motivates them as scientists and why they chose to focus on one of the most persistent challenges in oncology: how to target cancer-driving proteins that remain beyond the reach of current therapies.

The Alpe d’HuZes/KWF Fund will invest €4.5 million in Oncode Institute over the next two years. Made possible by the participants of Alpe d’HuZes, this funding accelerates innovative cancer research and enables promising ideas to more quickly develop into applications for patients. The investment supports multiple innovative research projects and aligns with the Alpe d’HuZes research themes: understanding, detection, and cure.

A novel cancer treatment strategy that enables the targeted degradation of membrane proteins has received funding from the highly competitive European Innovation Council Pathfinder programme. The OutMARCH project aims to make previously “undruggable” cancer proteins accessible, potentially offering new ways to overcome resistance to existing therapies.

The Lead4Life research programme has been awarded a €5 million public–private partnership (PPP) grant from Health~Holland for the development of lead-212–based radiopharmaceuticals for the treatment of cancer. 

Some scientific breakthroughs don’t belong to a single lab, discipline, or idea. They only become possible when collaboration is the strategy. Oncode Institute brought seven Oncode Investigators together across biology, AI, and clinical research to create PARM – a new method to break the limits of traditional genomic computing. This enabled them  to reveal the language for genetic instructions that tell genes when to turn on and off. 

On World Cancer Day, we bring together three people connected by a shared mission. Gerrit Oostenveld is a melanoma survivor and dedicated Patient Partner. Myrthe Jager and Joske Ubels are Oncode Researchers. What unites them is a belief that cancer research is strongest when scientists and patients work side by side.

More than 70 patient partners, patient organisations and Oncode researchers took part in the fifth edition of Oncode Institute’s Patient Perspective Programme Annual Meeting in Utrecht. The day created room for exchange, reflection and discussion on how experience and research can reinforce each other.

What if you could know, within days, whether a cancer treatment will actually work for a patient? For thousands of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year, that question is painfully urgent.  Cytoreductive surgery combined Platinum-based chemotherapy is still the standard first-line treatment, yet for nearly half of all patients it offers little benefit. Instead, it brings heavy side effects, delays effective care, and allows the disease to return in a more aggressive form.

Blocking a newly discovered immune pathway enables microglia to control diffuse midline glioma, laying the groundwork for a future therapeutic strategy. Researchers have identified a powerful new way to fight diffuse midline glioma (DMG), one of the most aggressive and lethal pediatric brain tumors in preclinical laboratory models.