Peter M. 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 was 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. 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.