Iris Nagtegaal - Biography#

As a medical doctor, pathologist and scientist, Iris Nagtegaal is committed to improve patients’ outcome, by giving them the best diagnosis as the start of the best treatment. She strives to combine excellent research with state-of-the-art patient care, leading to the better understanding of cancer and thus the facilitation of its cure. Within the field of colorectal cancer, she is one of the world’s leading pathologists, as indicated by her editorship of the colorectal cancer chapter (World Health Organisation Classification of Tumors), her considerable number of high impact publications and her H-index. Her involvement with a number of national and international organizations illustrates her central position in this field.

During her PhD (Leiden, 2002, cum laude) , she focused on the role of the pathologist in optimizing treatment of rectal cancer patients, leading to the worldwide implementation of quality of surgery assessment by the pathologist, ultimately improving surgical outcomes. Ever since, her research focuses on the improvement of prognosis of CRC patients, with a combination of pathology, epidemiology and molecular biology. She has studied large patient populations in clinical trials to determine optimal patient selection methods for specific treatments. For example, in 2009, her group was the first to describe the relation between BRAF mutations and response to cetuximab in metastatic CRC. In a combination of systematic reviews and histology in international patient cohorts from 2007-2017, she has defined the way in which TNM staging should be optimized, by providing strong evidence.

After a successful fellowship of the Dutch Cancer Society with amongst others Professor Stephen Duffy (Queen Mary University of London, focus on epidemiology) and Prof Craig Allred (Baylor College of Medicine, Houston/ Washington University St Louis, focus on molecular pathology), she has established herself as a senior researcher and from 2013 as a full professor at the Radboud University, where she combined molecular studies with epidemiological explorations. Her research evolved from exploration of pathology databases towards more complex analyses that were performed using developed linking systems between the national pathology database and other databases, such as the National Cancer Registry.