Cédric Blanpain

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 he started work at the Fuchs lab, Blanpain was part of a world-first: isolating stem cells based on their quiescence using histone H2B-fluorescent protein. The paper, cited more than 1900 times, has been seminal in subsequent work on stem cells. Using monoclonal antibodies, Blanpain managed to isolate hair follicle bulge stem cells and demonstrated their multi-potency (the fact that a single bulge stem cell can differentiate into all epidermal cell lineages). He also transplanted these mouse HF stem cells through grafts, leading to hair growth. Furthermore, he co-authored several papers characterizing the role of Wnt/Beta-Catenin stabilization in precocious bulge stem cell activation and the role of Notch signaling pathway in promoting spine cell development.