Edwin Cuppen's Biography

Edwin Cuppen, Professor, University Medical Center Utrecht

Edwin Cuppen (1970) obtained his masters in molecular sciences at the Agricultural University Wageningen in 1994 (cum laude) and his PhD degree with research on signal transduction in 1999 at the Radboud University in Nijmegen in the group of Prof. Be Wieringa.During his education, he spent half a year in het Jaenish lab at the Whitehead Institute in Boston. From 1999 to 2002 he performed postdoctoral research on C.elegans genomics at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam and the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in the group of Prof. Ronald Plasterk. In 2002 he started his own research group at the Hubrecht Institute on rat genetics and genomics and in 2007 he was appointed professor of Genome Biology at the Biology department of the Utrecht University. In 2009 he was appointed professor of Human Genetics and head of the research section of the Medical Genetics department of the University Medical Center Utrecht, while continuing his work at the Hubrecht Institute.
His area of expertise is in genomics and genetics and his scientific interests are in functional and personal genomics. In 2005, Edwin Cuppen was awarded a prestigious European Young Investigators Award for his work on naturally occurring and induced genetic variation in the laboratory rat. He was one of the first to generate gene knockout models in the rat and also showed the widespread effect of copy number variation on gene expression levels.
In his current work he combines experimental methods, including next-generation sequencing technology and animal model studies, with bioinformatic approaches to identify functional elements in genomes and to understand the effects of genetic variation under normal and disease conditions.?His research group has a long track record in high-throughput DNA analysis and was the first in Europe to implement AB’s next-generation sequencing technology SOLiD. This platform is now used for genome sequencing and mutation detection/discovery, but also for (small) RNA sequencing, ChIP-Seq, and structural variation detection. Currently, programs are set up to implement next-generation sequencing approaches for diagnostic purposes in clinical genetics and personalized cancer treatment. The group has a variety of academic and non-academic collaborations for the development and scaling of next-generation sequencing applications as well as future single molecule sequencing.
Edwin Cuppen is inventor on various patents and cofounder and CSO of the biotech startup company InteRNA Technologies that focuses on miRNA-based diagnostics and therapeutics. He is also cofounder of InteRNA Genomics that provides bioinformatic services for the analysis of next-generation sequencing data, including small RNA discovery and profiling.