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Biosketch:
Prof. dr. Gertjan B. van Ommen, PhD, is head of the Department of Human Genetics of the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), and founder of the Leiden Genome Technology Center (LGTC), a principal genomics facility in the Netherlands. He is Director of the Center for Medical Systems Biology (CMSB), one of the four Centers of Excellence established in 2003 by the Netherlands Genomics Initiative, aiming to improve diagnosis, therapy and prevention of common and rare diseases. Van Ommen has as major research interests in neuromuscular and neurodegenerative diseases, with a focus on Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), Huntington Disease and the development and application of genome research and diagnostic technology for disease study, diagnosis, therapy and prevention, including the societal aspects of genetic advances. As of 1998, his group has been pioneering the exon-skipping approach for therapy of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. After preclinical research in patient cells and mice, this approach is now the potential DMD therapy closest to market. In collaboration with the Leiden biotech company Prosensa, in 2007 the first-in-man proof-of-concept study was performed and in 2009 Prosensa completed the first successful phase I/II systemic trial. Van Ommen is coordinator of the national Dutch biobank integration infrastructure (BBMRI-NL), established in 2009. He is Editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Human Genetics and past president of HUGO and of the European and Dutch Societies of Human Genetics. He is a member of several national, EU and HUGO committees in the fields of genetics, innovative health care, genomics, bioinformatics, biobanking, ethics and intellectual property issues. He participates in several EU FP7 projects including BBMRI, the European biobanking infrastructure, and ENGAGE, analysing GWA studies of approximately 90.000 samples across Europe. He is treasurer of the international Public Population Project in Genomics (P3G), and board member of the Medical Genetics Centre (MGC) and the Centre for Biomedical Genetics (CBG). |
