Every year, around a hundred Belgian men are diagnosed with penile cancer. It’s a very rare and aggressive type of cancer, often diagnosed in its later stages. In 2015, specialist Prof Dr Maarten Albersen from UZ Leuven and his colleagues established a reference center in order to standardize care. Today, more than half of all Belgian penile cancer patients are treated there. The center also runs its own research program, as our knowledge about the disease remains limited. This research is essential for improving treatment options and patient outcomes. 

Annekatrien, one of the MD-PhD students at our center, works closely with Prof Albersen. In 2025, she completed her medical degree at KU Leuven and began specializing in urology. “I have always been drawn to cases where patients have limited treatment options and poor prognoses. I often found myself thinking that we should be able to do more for them,” says Annekatrien. “I had the opportunity of working on prostate cancer, and while it would have been very meaningful to contribute to that field, many researchers already do, and there are several treatment options available. Penile cancer is very different – it has fewer therapies, so patients are often more vulnerable. Because there is still so much work to be done, I felt it was where I could make the biggest difference.” 

To pursue this motivation, Annekatrien began her MD-PhD at CCB in collaboration with UZ Leuven. She now conducts research in the Laboratory of Translational Genetics led by Prof Diether Lambrechts, while closely working with Prof Dr Maarten Albersen in the clinic, where she consults with penile cancer patients. “Many medical professors often collaborate with research labs because you need both the clinical knowledge and the translational research expertise to improve the understanding of a given disease and improve patient care. The best ideas and projects often come about when these two worlds come together,” says Annekatrien.

For one of their current projects, the work is truly collaborative and reliant on this duality. With the goal of improving personalized treatment for patients, Prof Dr Maarten Albersen performs surgery on patients who have received pre-operative immunotherapy, after which Annekatrien collects tissue samples and brings them to the lab for processing. Once the quality of the sample has been assessed, more in-depth analysis can begin. “Our ultimate goal is to identify biomarkers that predict treatment response. In these earlier stages of my PhD, I am learning a lot about single-cell analysis and bioinformatics so that, in the future, I can analyze the data from the samples myself,” explains Annekatrien. 

Currently, she spends most of her days doing research at CCB, with one dedicated day at UZ Leuven seeing patients. In the long-term, Annekatrien is excited to become immersed in her subject and generate results of her own. “I realized how much I enjoyed research during my Master’s thesis – I loved diving into a very specific question and understanding things in detail. I’m really looking forward to the extra set of skills and knowledge I will gain from the PhD and then bringing that back to my patients. The idea that our research could contribute to better treatment options for them is something I find very meaningful and motivating.”

Annekatrien, thank you for your dedication to cancer research! We are very happy to have you at CCB ✨