2024 Emulating the Tumor-Stroma Interaction to Evaluate Targeted Therapeutics (4-5PM)

​

Jai Prakash is a Professor and Chair of Engineered Therapeutics at the Department of Advanced Organ Bioengineering and Therapeutics at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. He is a pharmaceutical and entrepreneurial scientist with a background in targeted (nano) therapeutics against fibrosis and the tumor microenvironment. He obtained his PhD (cum laude) in 2006 from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands in the field of drug targeting to treat renal fibrosis.

Thereafter, he worked as a Vice President – Preclinical Research at BiOrion Technologies with a joint position as Junior Group Leader at the University of Groningen. In 2011, he joined Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm (Sweden) as Assistant Professor in the Department of Oncology-Pathology, and subsequently took up a position as a Tenure-Track Professor at the University of Twente to set up his new research line on novel therapeutics against fibrosis and cancer. He also spent his sabbaticals at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University as a visiting scientist.

He has published >100 peer-reviewed publications and is also a co-inventor on several international patents. He is also the Founder and CSO of ScarTec Therapeutics, focusing on the development of novel peptide therapeutics against fibrotic diseases and pancreatic cancer. He is a co-founder of the CRS BeNeLux and France Local chapter and has served as the President from 2021 to 2023. He is also the Founder and Chair of the International Conference on Nanomedicine meets the Tumor Microenvironment (NanoTME), which was successfully organized in 2021 and 2023. He serves as an expert referee, panel member and Chair on more than 30 national and international grant agencies.

In 2024, he was awarded with the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant of €2.5 million to lead the research on targeting the extracellular matrix to advance immunotherapy in pancreatic cancer.