Linde Meyaard

Linde Meyaard obtained her PhD in 1995 (cum laude) at Sanquin in Amsterdam studying mechanism of immune dysfunction in HIV infection. In 1996 she entered the immune inhibitory receptor field as a post-doc at DNAX Research Institute in California. She identified a novel inhibitory immune receptor, LAIR-1, and continued her work on this receptor in as a fellow of the Royal Academy of Sciences (KNAW) in the UMC Utrecht.

Since 2000 she leads her own research group embedded in the Center Translational Immunology, supported by multiple grants such as the NWO Vidi and Vici. Meyaard was the first to identify collagens and collagen-like proteins as the natural ligands for LAIR-1. She then extended her research towards other inhibitory receptors and studies these inhibitory receptors in the context of cancer, inflammation and immunopathology of viral infections.

In 2016-2017 she spent a year as visiting scientist at Yale Medical School in the lab of Professor Ruslan Medzhitov. In 2018 she became a principle investigator at Oncode Institite for cancer research. Since september 2018 she is department head of the Center for Translational Immunology at the UMC Utrecht.

In her current work, Meyaard continues to ask fundamental immunological questions regarding inhibitory receptors to develop novel concepts that can be translated to clinic application. She proposed that inhibitory receptors can be grouped in functional categories with different purposes. Recently, her lab identified SIRL-1 as a receptor recognizing endogenous and microbial molecular patterns, introducing the concept of inhibitory pattern recognition receptors. Furthermore, they discovered that inflammation can rewire inhibitory signaling and influence the functional outcome. Together with clinicians, Meyaard translates these concepts to cancer and inflammation. By collaborating with multiple biotech and pharmaceutical companies she aims for clinical application of her work.