Meta Roestenberg is an infectious diseases clinician and professor in Human Models for Vaccine Development at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands. She is head of the Leiden University Center for Infectious Diseases (LUCID), a large department with 400+ employees tasked with the clinical infectious diseases and medical microbiology care, teaching and research. Within the department she directly manages a team of translational researchers making use of controlled human infection models to support her research into pathophysiology of disease and to complement phase 1 vaccine safety studies for preliminary efficacy. Meta holds a medicine degree (cum laude), a PhD in medicine (cum laude) and is registered as a travel medicine and infectious diseases clinician.

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Meta Roestenberg is an infectious diseases clinician and professor in Human Models for Vaccine Development at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands. She is head of the Leiden University Center for Infectious Diseases (LUCID), a large department with 400+ employees tasked with the clinical infectious diseases and medical microbiology care, teaching and research. Within the department she directly manages a team of translational researchers making use of controlled human infection models to support her research into pathophysiology of disease and to complement phase 1 vaccine safety studies for preliminary efficacy. Meta holds a medicine degree (cum laude), a PhD in medicine (cum laude) and is registered as a travel medicine and infectious diseases clinician.

Human models for vaccine development

Because of the increasing costs and complexity of vaccine design, the vaccine development pipeline is in need for a different, sustainable and cost-effective development model. Experimental medicine approaches such as the controlled infection of human volunteers can accelerate the development of novel vaccines through early proof-of-concept efficacy testing as well as by increasing the understanding of host-pathogen interaction in the human setting. As such, the development of human infection models has the potential to fill the gap between fundamental and preclinical vaccine research and generate knowledge that will foster the design and development of novel vaccines. More importantly, infection models may prove to be a method to reduce research and development costs and ensure that health care can be made accessible and affordable for populations worldwide, now and in years to come, including those affected by poverty. Continuing investment and scientific development of these models will increase insight in how and to what extent human models predict vaccine efficacy in downstream field trials, improve the yield of (immunological) correlates of protection and improve the ethical justification of added social value at the expense of exposing healthy volunteers to a risk.

The team now holds a broad portfolio of controlled human infection models for important global diseases such as malaria, Clostridioides, hookworm and schistosomiasis. With the use of these models, the team explores host-pathogen interaction, identifying new antigenic targets for vaccines and testing novel vaccine concepts such as genetically attenuated sporozoite vaccines against malaria. Recognizing the ethical complexity of healthy volunteer studies, the group is active in establishing ethical frameworks for such studies. The leadership of Roestenberg is widely recognized in large vaccine-development consortia (Inno4Vac, MUSSIC, Captivate, ShigaplexIM) and through her previous input on WHO advisory committees and her membership of the EDCTP scientific advisory board. Most importantly, numerous PhD students graduated under her supervision, several of whom received a cum laude distinction.

Malaria vaccines

Experimental human infections for malaria have been the cornerstone for malaria vaccine development for decades. The exploitation of such models has led to the development of attenuated parasite vaccination, which was pioneered by Roestenberg’s predecessors Sauerwein, Janse and Khan. In 2025, the Roestenberg-Franke-Fayard team demonstrated the potency of such late-liver-stage-arresting parasites, being able to protect malaria-naïve adults with a single immunisation. The team continues to invest efforts into these novel types of vaccines, to overcome hurdles which prevent materialisaton into a vaccine amenable for global administration. As the field of malaria vaccines has taught us, transfer of human models to endemic areas can be challenging but is essential to unleash their full potential in the vaccine pipeline.

Academic Carreer

Meta Roestenberg studied Medicine at the University of Maastricht, where she obtained her medical degree cum laude in 2004. During her medical training she had the opportunity to follow internships in Africa and South-East Asia, where she became fascinated by infectious diseases. She returned to India for additional training several months after her graduation and then decided to dedicate her professional career to poverty related infectious diseases. She completed her PhD cum laude in 2013 at the department of Medical Microbiology of the Radboud University Medical Center, where she developed a human model for malaria immunity. She was trained in internal medicine at the Radboud University Medical Center and the Canisius Wilhelmina Hospital, both in Nijmegen.

In 2014 she registered as Infectious Diseases specialist at the Leiden University Medical Center and was awarded a VENI grant from the Dutch Society for Scientific Research (ZonMw) and a Gisela Thier fellowship to start her own research group. She subsequently received an ERC starting grant and ZonMw VIDI which she has used to expand her team. She is internationally known for her research in poverty related infectious diseases such as malaria, schistosomiasis and hookworm, for which she was awarded the Boehringer Ingelheim Parasitology Award (2018), de Bailey K. Ashford medal of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (2020), the Heineken Young Investigator Award (2020) and the Mercator Sapiens prize (2025). In 2021 she was appointed full professor (chair: human models for vaccine development), in 2025 she was appointed head of LUCID.

Future

In the future, Meta will remain dedicated to combatting infectious diseases that cause significant morbidity and mortality in the world through research, clinical service and training of the next generation of clinicians and scientists in the infectious diseases field.

Publications