Dr. Marten Hornsveld is a molecular biologist that focuses on understanding and targeting molecular signal transduction in cancer. During his PhD program, he studied the role of PI3K-AKT signaling in breast cancer using a variety of mouse and cell based models. In his postdoctoral research he moved into the organoid technology field and worked on building representative organoid models for pancreatic cancer. This resulted in the establishment of a novel close-to-patient mini-tumor model that can be employed for both basic research and pre-clinical studies. A year ago, he switched gears and started as a senior scientist at Crown Bioscience. Here, he continues to work on building pre-clinical tumor models to facilitate rapid discovery of promising lead compounds in the oncology field.