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Professor Ton Rabelink is professor of internal medicine and works on kidney development and kidney disease. His aim is to develop a cure for patients with kidney failure that makes the current lifelong and invasive treatments redundant.
Professor Ton Rabelink aims to understand kidney disease by working with mini kidneys in the lab, referred to as kidney organoids. He primarily focuses on the formation of blood vessels in the kidney, so called vascularisation. Since one of the most important tasks of the kidney is to filter the blood, a good vascularisation is essential for the kidney to function as it should. Professor Rabelink and his team also aim to understand more about the development of kidneys, when fully functional and when impaired by disease. Their hope is to find a therapy that can restore kidney function in patients.
Professor Rabelink is a principal investigator and director of reNEW’s Leiden node, responsible for the oversight and coordination of all reNEW’s activities at there. He is also professor of internal medicine, head of the department of Internal Medicine and a nephrologist at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC).
As head of his research lab, Professor Rabelink has supervised many PhD students and works together with numerous international collaborators. He is additionally the figurehead of the route Regenerative Medicine related to the Dutch Science Agenda and chief scientific officer at NecstGen, the Netherlands Center for the Clinical Advancement of Cell & Gene Therapies.
reNEW researchers have a strong track record of scientific excellence in stem cell biology
They have performed pioneering work in stem cell research spanning different tissue and cell types, different technological advances and different stages of applied research. This provides an unprecedented international opportunity to utilise the combined wealth of knowledge, complementary skills sets and clinical experience across reNEW to push stem cell discoveries toward translational outcomes.