I am an assistant professor in Molecular Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine of Lund University and group leader of the Cell Reprogramming in Hematopoiesis and Immunity Laboratory. I have long held an interest in understanding how cell identity is acquired, maintained and ultimately modified or reversed. During my PhD, I have made my first contributions to the cellular reprogramming field by establishing cell fusion and heterokaryons as a new approach to study reprogramming mechanisms towards pluripotency. Of note I implicated the essential role of Polycomb repression in reprogramming. Then, during my postdoc, I brought cellular reprogramming concepts to hematopoeisis for the first time. I identified a combination of transcription factors that induces hemogenesis and established that cellular reprogramming approaches can inform the developmental specification of hematopoietic stem cells. My independent research group has now shown that cooperative transcription factor binding mediates hemogenic induction and pioneered cell fate reprogramming approaches in immunology with induced dendritic cells. This conceptual shift opens exciting opportunities to merge cellular reprogramming and cancer immunotherapy.
