Meet the 2021 Young SIOP awardees - Annelot Meijer

Hi there! For the coming weeks, our blog will be dedicated to our Young SIOP Award winners!

Please meet Annelot Meijer, YI from the The Netherlands, in her own words.



I am a health scientist and am currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology (PMC) in Utrecht. I just finished my PhD on hearing loss and tinnitus during and after childhood cancer treatment. 

My thesis addressed several gaps of knowledge with regard to ototoxicity research, including the course of cisplatin-induced hearing loss development over time during childhood cancer treatment, clinical and genetic risk factors associated with hearing loss in children treated with cisplatin, and the occurrence of and risk factors for tinnitus in childhood cancer survivors. During that time, I was granted a generous donation from Novartis Pharma my work on the CROWN toxicity registry, and from The Gaby Olthuis Foundation for the tinnitus-related projects. I established several national and international collaborations over the past years with experts in the field of audiology and pediatric oncology. 

I chaired the Ototoxicity Task Force under the umbrella of the International Society of Pediatric Oncology consisting of 30 international leaders in the field of ototoxicity research, with whom I developed recommendations for hearing loss monitoring during childhood cancer therapy. I had a central role in the European PanCareLIFE project, in which I and other collaborators discovered a novel genetic variant associated with hearing loss in children treated with cisplatin. I also had the opportunity to perform an ototoxicity research project at BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute in Vancouver, Canada where I joined forces with experts in the field of pharmacogenomics and clinical pharmacology. 

During my postdoc, I will extend the ototoxicity research line in the PMC with a main focus on identification of additional clinical and genetic risk factors, as well as prevention of ototoxicity in children with cancer.

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