Peter Michael Lansdorp

Peter Michael Lansdorp (born December 16, 1952) is recognized for his contributions in the fields of hematology, medical genetics and cancer research. He has made significant contributions to the understanding of genome instability, particularly in relation to aging and cancer. His research has focused on the biology of blood-forming stem cells, telomeres and genome analysis. He is also known for the development of techniques including single cell Strand-seq and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) techniques such as Q-FISH and flow FISH.
==Early Life & Career==
Peter Lansdorp grew up in the Netherlands (Den Haag and Wassenaar). He obtained a Medical Degree from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam in 1976. His early career included work on monoclonal antibodies at Sanquin and he obtained a PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 1985. Between 2011 and 2017, he served as the Founding Scientific Director of the European Research Institute for the Biology of Aging at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He returned to Vancouver in 2017, resuming his role as a Distinguished Scientist at the Terry Fox Laboratory and a Professor in Hematology and Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia.
==Research==
In 1984, Lansdorp made a significant contribution to the field of monoclonal antibodies with the discovery of a method to efficiently form bifunctional tetrameric antibody complexes. This method was patented and later licensed to StemCell Technologies in Vancouver.</ref> Lansdorp's early work in Vancouver predominantly focused on experimental hematology. He first demonstrated that the functional properties of purified "candidate" blood forming stem cells, including their self-renewal properties, change dramatically during development. He subsequently showed that telomere repeats are lost in purified hematopoietic stem cells supporting the concept that blood stem cells do not truly "self-renew" but are mortal like most other somatic cells.
Lansdorp also developed a novel fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) method to measure the length of telomere repeats using peptide nucleic acid (PNA) probes. He subsequently showed that flow cytometry can be used to measure the average telomere length in individual nucleated blood cells.
In 2002 Lansdorp provided compelling evidence for the formation of guanine quadruplex (G4) DNA structures in C. elegans. He proposed that the dog-1 helicase gene is required to unwind G4 DNA structures that occasionally form during DNA synthesis. The closest human homolog of the dog-1 gene is the BRIP1 gene. These studies provided the first genetic evidence that G4 structures occur in vivo and that specialized helicases are required to unwind G4 structures and thus prevent instability of guanine-rich DNA.
Subsequently, Lansdorp and colleagues identified a previously unknown helicase gene as a major regulator of telomere length in the mouse. He named the gene RTEL for Regulator of Telomere Length In follow-up work, it was shown that mutations in the human RTEL1 gene result in telomere loss and bone marrow failure.
In 2012, his laboratory introduced the single cell Strand-seq technique, which has diverse applications in genome science, including the production of chromosome-length haplotypes and the characterization of polymorphic inversions. In 2022, Lansdorp proposed theories regarding the role of telomerase in cancer suppression in long-lived vertebrates and the impact of high telomerase levels in preimplantation embryos in determining telomere length and lifespan differences between sexes (20).
Category:1952 births
Category:Dutch people
Category:Hematology
Category:Medical genetics