Rob Vreeken 

 

In 2015 Dr Rob Vreeken joined the team of Ron Heeren in Maastricht as Associate Professor, to deploy Mass Spectrometry Imaging as a novel platform in several phases of drug discovery and development. Merging of Metabolomics, Lipidomics (Leiden) and Imaging modalities (Maastricht) with drug discovery processes (Janssen) is resulting in better scientific decision making in view of efficacy and tolerability of new drugs.

After his MSc in Analytical Chemistry from Leiden University (prof. van der Greef), Dr Vreeken started his PhD under the guidance of late prof. Roland Frei and prof. Udo Brinkman on LC-MS and here his confidence in developing novel analytical tools to, then, measure environmental pollutants, was further strengthened. During his post-doc (1992-1993) in Switzerland with prof. Houriet, around using Membrane introduction-MS for the on-line analysis of pollutants, he returned to the Netherlands to ‘improve’ (drinking) water quality in EU at KIWA (1994-1997). Slowly, his attention diverted towards the pollutant’s effects and further into disease mechanisms and response to drug treatment. At TNO (1997-2000) he applied mass spectrometry-based strategies to answer questions from various applications, e.g. peptides in milk, impurity profiling of active ingredients, endogenous and exogenous (pre-clinical) metabolites screening related to healthy diets, metabolomics, vitamin metabolism, protein identification and quantification, etc. He also taught the 1st int. hands-on LC-MS course, which ran successfully (8 courses/year) for several years (also after he left). Summer 2000 he joined Waters to to teach/guide/provide leadership (teams up to 40 FTE’s) and collaborate with key opinion leaders, and at the same time assist instrument and software development. After a short period (2007) at a Pharma-CRO focussing on new drugs and their efficacy, he moved to academia (2008) to impact on i) development of mass spectrometry-based metabolomics technologies, and ii) apply these technologies in real-life to understand disease initiation and progression.

Together with Thomas Hankemeier, he build the Demonstration and Competence lab and the Research lab of the Netherlands Metabolomics Centre (NMC) at the LACDR within Leiden University. As Assistant Professor he supervised/mentored a large team of scientists at different levels (amongst 8 PhD Projects). During this time, he joined the board of the Netherlands Mass Spectrometry Society (NVMS 2009-2016 and chair 2013-2016) and organised several single- and three-day symposia. In 2014 he joined Janssen Pharma to lead the Bio-Analytical discovery team to explore and deploy emerging technologies like new -omics technologies.

Dr Vreeken is internationally recognised scientist (> 120 papers) who is has been invited frequently for giving a plenary or tutorial lecture at an international conference.

Presentation

Mass Spec Imaging and Metabolomics: Opportunities and Challenges