Willem Lesterhuis

Willem (Joost) Lesterhuis is an NHMRC RD Wright Research Fellow with the National Centre for Asbestos Related Diseases (NCARD) at the University of Western Australia in Perth.

Joost completed his clinical training as a medical oncologist at the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands, while combining it with a PhD in tumour immunology. He moved to Perth for two years, working as a visiting post-doc at the Tumour Immunology Group at the University of Western Australia, after which he worked as a medical oncologist/cancer scientist at the Academic Medical Centre at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Since 2013 Joost works as a full time scientist at the School of Medicine and Pharmacology/National Centre for Asbestos Related Diseases at the University of Western Australia.

Current research projects include:
1- Combining chemotherapy and immunotherapy to treat cancer, in particular mesothelioma and lung cancer.
2- Unravelling the cellular and molecular processes that govern successful immunotherapy-induced cancer regression, using systems biology approaches.
3- Identification of the molecular processes that drive mesothelioma invasion using network analysis of high-dimensional molecular data from mouse models and patient samples.