Cédric Blanpain (born 6 September 1970) is a Belgian researcher in the field of stem cells (embryology, tissue homeostasis and cancer). He is a tenured professor of developmental biology and genetics at Université Libre de Bruxelles and director of the stem cell and cancer lab at its Faculty of Medicine. He was one of the first researchers in the world to use cell lineage tracing in cancer research and he showed for the first time the existence of cancer stem cells in solid tumors in vivo. He was selected by Nature as one of 10 People who mattered most in 2012 and he received the outstanding young investigator award of the International Society for Stem Cell Research.
Biography
Born in Uccle in 1970. Cedric Blanpain attended Collège Saint-Hubert for his secondary education. Graduating in 1987, he started medical school with an aim of becoming a psychiatrist. As soon as his first year, he started doing research in human physiology at the Institut de Recherche Inter-Disciplinaire en Biologie Moléculaire and was thereafter introduced to molecular biology by Gilbert Vassart, the director of the IRIBHM.
After graduating summa cum laude from medical school in 1995, Cedric Blanpain started a specialization in internal medicine. In the third year, he interrupted his clinical education to focus on research. He did his PhD in the lab of Marc Parmentier, dedicated to the study of G-protein coupled receptors. During this period, the Parmentier lab characterized the CCR5 GPCR and discovered its role as a co-receptor in HIV infection. Cedric Blanpain earned his PhD in 2001 for his work on CCR5 and HIV infection and received the 2002 Galen Award of Pharmacology in recognition of his graduate work.
After earning his PhD, Cedric Blanpain went back to finish his board certification in internal medicine, sub-specializing in genetics. From there on, his career would be entirely dedicated to research. In 2002, he earned a fellowship from the Belgian American Educational Foundation to study in the USA (Boat of 2002) . He did his post-doc with Elaine Fuchs (a lifelong mentor) at the Laboratory of Mammalian Cell Biology and Development of Rockefeller University, studying epidermal stem cells and tissue differentiation. The Fuchs lab was one of the few labs then studying epidermal stem cells. He was also a long-term fellow of NATO and the Human Frontier Science Program during this period.
In 2006, he accepted an offer from the Belgian National Research Fund to become an independent group leader at his home institute, the IRIBHM. He established the stem cells and cancer lab at ULB, becoming professor in 2013. He received a starting grant from the ERC in 2008 and a consolidator grant in 2014. He received a career development award from the Human Frontier Science Program. Since 2011, he is also an investigator of the Walloon Excellence in Life Science and Biotechnology (WELBIO). He pioneered the use of lineage tracing in cancer research. Ever since establishing his lab, Blanpain received several international awards, including the EMBO Young Investigator Award and the Liliane Bettencourt Award for Life Sciences 2012.
He has also written several authoritative reviews on stem cells for journals such as Cell, Science, Cell Stem Cell and Nature.
Research
Cancer cell of origin, tumor stem cells and heterogeneity
The Blanpain lab has been studying the cells at the origin of epithelial tumors as well as the role and the mechanisms by which cancer stem cells regulate tumor growth and relapse after therapy.
His lab showed that basal cell carcinoma stem from cells of the interfollicular epidermis and infundibulum rather than hair follicles. In 2018, his lab identified the cell population in basal cell carcinoma that mediates vismodegib resistance. They also showed that the administration of Vismodegib in combination with a Wnt inhibitor leads to tumor eradication, a potential new strategy against BCC.
They defined for the first time the quantitative dynamics of tumor initiation at the single cell level from the activation of the oncogene to the development of invasive tumors and demonstrated that the capacity of oncogene expressing cells to induce tumor formation depends on the specific clonal dynamics of the oncogene targeted stem cells at the origin of the cancer.