Twan de Vries (Department of Cardiology, LUMC)
Antoine de Vries started his professional career in the Virology Division of Utrecht University. In 1994, Antoine received his PhD, and then moved to the Karolinska Institute with a long-term EMBO fellowship. Subsequently, he acquired a position as assistant professor and later as associate professor in the Department of Molecular Cell Biology at the LUMC. In 2011, Antoine teamed up with Daniël Pijnappels to establish a new research group within the Department of Cardiology, combining biology, physics, engineering, and medicine for (1) studying the mechanisms of electrical activation and propagation, and cellular development & homeostasis in healthy and diseased hearts and (2) inventing new biological and hybrid approaches to treat heart rhythm disorders. This has resulted in a strong research line in which optogenetics is used to understand and modulate cardiomyocyte function and in the development of a broadly applicable conditional cell immortalization technology. A major scientific achievement has been the generation, characterization, and application of the first lines of differentiation-competent human cardiomyocytes. Antoine also stood at the basis of the first successful attempt to ontogenetically terminate a cardiac arrhythmia using optogenetics and had an important role in the development of a fully automated system for shock-free AF termination in vivo.