prof. dr. Sandra Heskamp

About Sandra Heskamp

Sandra Heskamp studied Biomedical Sciences at the Radboud University of Nijmegen. In 2009, she graduated in two master’s: Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Human Pathobiology. That same year she started her PhD project Molecular Imaging of Receptor Tyrosine Kinases in Cancer, a collaborative project between the department of Nuclear Medicine and Medical Oncology. During her PhD she also participated in a European consortium (Innovative Medicines Initiative) that investigated the potential of diffusion weighted MRI and [18F]FLT as early biomarkers of treatment response in cancer. In addition, she worked as a visiting researcher at the Technical University Munich to study the potential of alpha-emitting radionuclides for cancer treatment. In June 2014 she obtained her PhD and she started working as a post-doc at the department of Medical Imaging at the Radboudumc. Here, she started her own research group focusing on nuclear imaging and therapy in immuno-oncology. Together with scientists in her group she develops novel radiotracers to visualize tumor cells and their immune-microenvironment, in order to study the biology of cancer in an in vivo manner. Futhermore, these tracers are labeled with therapeutic radionuclides to specifically deliver a high dose of radiation to a tumor. Her current research focuses on the radiobiological and immunological effects of radiation on tumor cells and their immune-microenvironment.