Noel de Miranda is Professor of Translational Oncology and Principal Investigator of the Cancer Immunogenomics Group at Leiden University Medical Center. He is a member of De Jonge Akademie and Young Academy Europe, and currently serves as President of the Young Academies Science Advice Structure. His research has been recognized with several prestigious awards, including a Dutch Cancer Society (KWF) Young Investigator Award (2015), a Veni grant (2016), an ERC Starting Grant (2019), and a Vidi grant (2022).

Meer informatie over Noel de Miranda

Noel de Miranda is Professor of Translational Oncology and Principal Investigator of the Cancer Immunogenomics Group at Leiden University Medical Center. He is a member of De Jonge Akademie and Young Academy Europe, and currently serves as President of the Young Academies Science Advice Structure. His research has been recognized with several prestigious awards, including a Dutch Cancer Society (KWF) Young Investigator Award (2015), a Veni grant (2016), an ERC Starting Grant (2019), and a Vidi grant (2022).

Like all living systems, cancers evolve — but unfortunately, they do so within our own bodies, often disrupting normal biological functions. A key part of this evolution is how cancer cells interact with the immune system, an interaction that is both fascinating and incredibly complex. On one hand, tumours can contain many different types of cancer cells, and no two tumours are exactly the same — not even within the same patient. On the other hand, the immune system is a dynamic and intricate network made up of many types of cells and defence mechanisms. In some patients, the immune system successfully detects and destroys cancer cells. In others, cancer cells manage to hide from immune detection — or even hijack parts of the immune system to help them grow and survive.

This tug-of-war between cancer and the immune system is a major focus of our research. I find it especially intriguing because the immune system evolved primarily to protect us from external threats like bacteria and viruses. Yet, it also has the capacity to recognize and attack cancer cells. In fact, therapies that harness the immune system — known as immunotherapies — have already shown remarkable success in treating clinically challenging cancers like melanoma and lung cancer.

In our lab, we explore these complex immune-cancer interactions using cutting-edge technologies that let us examine cancer tissues and their underlying biology at high resolution. One of our main goals is to better understand the roles of immune cell types that have received less attention in cancer research but may hold great promise for developing new and more effective immunotherapies.

Academic career

Noel de Miranda obtained his degree in Applied Biology from the University of Minho, Portugal, in 2004. From 2005 to 2010, he pursued his PhD at the Department of Pathology at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), where he began working at the interface of cancer biology and immunology. His PhD thesis was entitled Mismatch Repair and MUTYH Deficient Colorectal Cancers: At the Crossroad of Genomic Stability and Immune Escape.

Between 2010 and 2013, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, where he applied emerging next-generation sequencing technologies to study the genetics of B cell lymphomas. After a brief return to the LUMC as a postdoctoral researcher, he established his own research group — the Cancer Immunogenomics group — at the Department of Pathology in 2016. This was made possible through a KWF (Dutch Cancer Society) Young Investigator Award and an NWO (Dutch Research Council) Veni grant. He has since been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant (2019) and an NWO Vidi grant (2022).

In addition to his research, De Miranda has been actively involved in science policy at the institutional, national, and international levels. He has served as a board member of the LUMC’s Young Faculty Network and was a member of the Young Academy Leiden. He is currently a member of De Jonge Akademie (serving on its board from 2023 to 2025) and of Young Academy Europe. He is particularly committed to promoting sustainable academic environments for early-career researchers, with a focus on effective funding mechanisms and support structures. Since 2025, Noel de Miranda serves as President of the Young Academies Science Advice Structure (YASAS), which contributes to the European Commission’s Science Advice Mechanism.