KHMW Langerhuizen Oeuvre Prize awarded to Christine Mummery

reNEW’s Prof. Dr. Christine Mummery (Leiden University Medical Center) has been awarded the Langerhuizen Oeuvre Prize 2025 by The Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW). Mummery’s research aims to find new medicines for cardiovascular diseases. Around the year 2000, she was one of the first in the Netherlands to focus on pluripotent stem cell research.

The KHMW Langerhuizen Oeuvre Award has been presented annually since 2020 as a tribute to a scientist who has made a valuable contribution to the field of natural sciences. The award is given to a different field each year. In 2025 it became the turn of the (bio)medical, veterinary, dental and pharmaceutical sciences. The KHMW Langerhuizen Oeuvre Prize carries a monetary award of 25 thousand euros.

Mummery: “I am very honored by the award of this prize by the oldest “Learned Society” in the Netherlands. It is very special that KHMW members represent  society and science since in my field of study, “stem cells”, impacts  both.”

Pioneering work
Mummery receives the award for her pioneering work in the field of stem cells. Stem cell research was controversial for a long time. In the late 1990s, American researchers succeeded for the first time in generating human embryonic stem cells from embryos surplus to needs in IVF. In the Netherlands, the use of these early embryos for research was still prohibited at the time. However, Mummery was offered embryonic stem cells by an Australian colleague that she could use for research. The late Els Borst, then the Netherlands Minister of Health, encouraged Mummery to collect the cells together with her team in Australia. Simultaneously, Borst was working on a bill on the use of embryos for research. Using the stem cells from Australia,  Mummery and her team were the first to generate heart cells in the Netherlands in 2000. This research  helped get the bill through the House of Representatives. The Embryo Act came into effect in 2002.

During a year-long sabbatical at Harvard University in 2007, Mummery learned a new way to make human pluripotent stem cells without embryos: human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs). When she returned to the Netherlands in 2008, she and her team started generating hiPSC, once again, the first in the Netherlands. Mummery has used hiPSC technology since to model cardiovascular diseases in the lab and identify new, personalized treatments that are able to combat these diseases.

Eyes on the future
In her long career, Mummery has witnessed many scientific changes. She is particularly excited about recent developments in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. Mummery believes AI has made the work of research much easier. And robots help to do work much faster and with greater precision. She concludes with satisfaction: ‘In my entire career, I have never been so close to a point where we – my team and I – discover medicines that can cure patients and prove it in a large-scale clinical trial…’

About Christine Mummery
Mummery was born in England, where she received her PhD in 1978 from the University of London and began her career as a postdoc at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht with a grant from the British Royal Society. In 2002, she became professor of Developmental Biology at Utrecht University. In 2008, she moved to Leiden University Medical Center, where she became head of the Department of Anatomy and Embryology. Between 2015 and 2023, Mummery was also part-time professor of Vascular Modelling at the University of Twente.

Want to know more?
Christine Mummery was interviewed in context of the KHMW Langerhuizen Oeuvre Prize. You can read the full interview on the KHMW website (only in Dutch).