Titia de Lange

Titia de Lange (born 11 November 1955, in Rotterdam) is the Director of the Anderson Center for Cancer Research, the Leon Hess professor and the head of Laboratory Cell Biology and Genetics at Rockefeller University.

De Lange obtained her Masters on "Chromatin structure of the human β-globin gene locus" at the University of Amsterdam in 1981, and subsequently her PhD at the same institution in 1985 with Piet Borst on surface antigen genes in trypanosomes. In 1985 she joined Harold Varmus's lab at the University of California, San Francisco. Since 1990 she has had a faculty position at the Rockefeller University. In 2011, de Lange received the Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science. In 2013 she won a Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, worth $3 million, for her research on telomeres.

In 2000 she became correspondent of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Career Titia de Lange attended the University of Amsterdam where she received her bachelor's and master's degree in biochemistry. She also earned her Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam while working at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. She won the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2013 for her research on telomeres, illuminating how they protect chromosome ends and their role in genome instability in cancer by mapping the complex of molecules that loops the strands together and protects them. In addition to making headway in revealing the structure of DNA, her research has implications for the understanding of aging and cancer.

Research Titia de Lange originally wanted to study chemistry after finishing high school in the Netherlands but the lack of women in chemistry among students and teachers alike convinced her to study biology with a biochemistry track instead. Her research identified a patient with γβ-thalassemia with a DNA translocation that caused the inactivation of the β-Globin gene. She also found that tumor cells also have significantly shorter telomeres. The nucleotide sequence of telomeres is TTAGGG.

At Rockefeller University her research focused on identifying proteins associated with telomeres and their role in protecting telomeres from processes of DNA repair. With the assistance of Bas van Steensel, de Lange conducted various studies on proteins associated with telomeres. In her research, she proposed that TRF1 inhibits the action of telomerase. She and her co-investigators, Bas van Steensel and Agata Smogorzewska, also discovered the protein TRF2 and found that it prevents the end-to-end fusing of telomeres, in addition to other functions.

One of de Lange's major discoveries was the discovery of the t-loop structure of telomeres in her collaboration with Jack Griffith. This was shown through electron microscopy demonstrating that linear telomeric DNA can be remodeled by TRF2 into duplex loops (t loops). The six shelterin subunits are: TRF1, TRF2, TIN2, Rap1, TPP1, and POT1.