Dr Vanessa LaPointe is an Associate Professor at the MERLN Institute for Technology-Inspired Regenerative Medicine. She first trained as a biomedical engineer at The Johns Hopkins University (USA) and moved into the field of regenerative medicine during her PhD with Prof. Molly Stevens at Imperial College London (UK). She received a CIHR Fellowship (Canada) for her postdoctoral research at the University of Twente (the Netherlands) with Prof. Jan de Boer.
Since 2016, Dr LaPointe leads the Cell Therapy group, which is developing (stem) cell-based therapies for chronic diseases. She is proud to work on the entire bench-to-bedside spectrum, from basic discoveries about cell identity and cell fate, through to pre-clinical studies and clinical translation. The lab’s therapies are directed towards diverse indications, including musculoskeletal disease, renal disease, and corneal and ocular surface diseases. They are funded by public and private sources and participate in several international consortia.
From 2016–2020, Dr LaPointe was the Scientific Coordinator and Deputy Programme Director of RegMed XB, an international public–private partnership to cure chronic diseases by bringing regenerative medicine solutions to patients. She was selected as a member of the Maastricht Young Academy in 2020 and was elected as its chair from 2022–2024. Since 2020, she has been an elected member of the University Council.
