From PhD research to cancer treatment: Lucas Czentner is going for it

By starting a company, PhD candidate Lucas Czentner has taken an important step towards realizing clinical trials of a new cancer treatment. Czentner worked on the treatment, a form of immunotherapy, during his PhD project at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Utrecht University. The treatment was found to be very effective against aggressive forms of cancer in mice. The PhD candidate's main goal is to make a positive impact on the lives of many patients by eventually bringing the treatment to the market. Czentner experienced how cancer strongly affected the lives of several people around him. Two of his cousins got cancer and one of them died at a young age. Czentner: "The knowledge, potential and uniqueness that are lost when somebody dies of cancer, I really feel that." In addition, Czentner's father suffered strongly from the chemotherapy that he received to treat his cancer.