Susana Chuva de Sousa Lopes - Curriculum Vitae#

Susana M. Chuva de Sousa Lopes is Professor of Developmental Biology at the LUMC and Guest Professor at Ghent University, Belgium. She earned her PhD in the group of C. Mummery at the Hubrecht Institute, where she became interested in gametogenesis. This was followed by two postdocs in the groups of A. Surani and A. McLaren at the prestigious Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, UK supported by NWO TALENT and Isaac Newton Trust grants. She returned to the Hubrecht Institute in 2006 to continue research on stem cells and germ cell development and started her own lab at the LUMC in 2008.

Susana was part of the team that discovered Epiblast Stem Cells (EpiSC), seminal work that led to the discovery that pluripotent stem cells (PSC) can be cultured in two different states: naïve and primed (Brons, 2007, ref 10). This study contributed to unifying the mouse and human stem cell fields. Susana then investigated the transition from human inner cell mass (ICM) to human embryonic stem cells (hESC) in detail and discovered a post-ICM intermediate (PICMI), the epithelialized epiblast, is necessary to generate hESCs and account for their post-implantation identity (O’Leary, 2012, ref 7). In addition, she developed an (open access) webtool Keygenes, that uses machine learning to predict tissue-identity based on the transcriptional profile of differentiated human PSC, by comparing this profile to their in vivo counterparts in development and adulthood. This machine learning algorithm facilitates evaluation of the effectiveness and accuracy of human PSC-differentiation protocols (Takasato, 2015, ref 8).

Her group currently investigates the dynamic composition of the human foetal and adult ovary at the single-cell level and develops strategies to mature oocytes in artificial follicles for fertility preservation. She incorporates microfluidics approaches to optimize these methods. She investigates in vitro gametogenesis in humans, aiming to uncover what would be required to turn female (XX) PSCs into sperm and male (XY) PSCs into oocytes. A human in vitro gametogenesis model will be a significant breakthrough for developing reproduction toxicity assays to test chemical compounds and pollutants, as well as to develop methods of contraception.