Marleen Kok

Academic History

Marleen Kok, MD, PhD, is a Group Leader for the Breast Cancer Immunotherapy Group at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Dr Kok specializes in the development of novel immunotherapies for the treatment of patients with breast cancer. She is also the Senior Group Leader in the department of Tumor Biology and Immunology.

She completed her medical degree in 2004 at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, where she underwent undergraduate research training on neuroblastoma genetics. She went on to achieve a PhD in 2009 at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, which focused on biomarkers for therapy response in breast cancer. She also completed her residency in Medical Oncology and a fellowship at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, in 2015. She also worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Dutch Cancer Society at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, and in 2026, Dr Kok returned to the Netherlands Cancer Institute to work as a Medical Oncologist and Translational Research fellow.

Speaking on the translational research on breast cancer immunology

Dr Kok underwent training on breast cancer biomarkers during her PhD, which laid the foundation for her current work in translational breast cancer research. She is the principal investigator for several investigator-initiated clinical trials that investigate the efficacy of PD-1 blockade with low-does chemotherapy in patients with breast cancer. Her translational research group aims to investigate the effect of immune checkpoint blockade and develop novel combination immunotherapies to provide personalized treatments for patients with breast cancer.