Christine Mummery

‘I studied physics as a bachelor degree and then carried out a PhD in biophysics. In investigating lots of different things in cells and I ended up finding the cells themselves completely fascinating” says Christine Mummery, who now is Professor and Chair of Developmental Biology at Leiden University Medical Centre. At the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht and later a short period in Harvard University, she conducted ground-breaking research on turning human embryonic stem cells into cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells). She was among the first to inject human cardiomyocytes into a mouse heart after a heart attack to see whether they would replace the cells that died and repair the damage. But Mummery and her group discovered that this did not work: the injected cells remained completely disorganized in the heart and did not all pull in the same direction. Heart failure took place as if no cardiomyocytes had been transplanted at all. Mummery therefore turned to using stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes and vascular cells as disease models, for drug discovery and to check drug safety. This is proving a great success.

‘Our idea is not to use the cardiomyocytes as the therapy to treat patients, but to use the cells themselves as if they were the patient,’ Mummery says. ‘We can make sick cardiomyocyte from sick patients in this way through stem cells. If we can find a drug that “cures” the cardiomyocyte in the laboratory, then we can perhaps use the same drug to cure the patient.’

Mummery is chief editor of Stem Cell Reports, Cell Stem Cells and Stem Cells and author of the popular book on stem cells ‘Stem Cells: Scientific Facts and Fiction’ (2014). She is board member of the Netherlands Medical Research Council and president of the International Society of Differentiation. She is also a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science and was recently awarded a European Research Council Advanced grant for her stem cell research.