olivier De Wever

Prof. Olivier De Wever dedicates his scientific life to understand the involvement of the tumor environment to cancer progression. During his PhD he published seminal fundamental papers showing the importance of CAF in colon cancer progression (De Wever et al., FASEBJ 2004, J Pathol 2003, J Cell Science 2004). During his post-doc he continued to focus on the origin of CAF  (De Boeck et al., GUT 2013) and expanded his research ideas into cancer-associated adipose tissue (Lapeire et al., Cancer Res 2014). Prof. Olivier De Wever was visiting scientist at NIH (Bethesda, US) and Centre de Recherche Hôpital Saint-Antoine (Paris, France) and University of Calgary (Calgary, Canada). 

The current lab is an ecosystem to study tumor-environment interactions  including design of model systems (De Jaeghere and De Vlieghere et al., Biomaterials 2018), response to therapy of CAF (Tommelein et al., Cancer Res 2018), and exploitation of CAF as therapy (De Vlieghere et al., Biomaterials 2015). Several review papers are published focusing on tumor environment interactions (De Wever et al., Semin Cancer Biol 2014; De Jaeghere et al., Trends Cancer 2019; Steenbrugge et al., Cancer Res 2021; Xia and De Wever, Trends Cancer 2025). Guidelines and minimum information for spheroid 3D cell cultures are identified by initiating the MISpheroID consortium (Peirsman and Blondeel et al., Nature Methods 2021; Blondeel et al., Nature Protocols 2025). Patient-derived orthotopic xenograft models are established to study minimal residual disease and metastatic relapse (Fischer et al., Clin Trans Med 2023).