Janine Terra Erler

Janine Terra Erler is a Professor at BRIC, University of Copenhagen, where she leads the Erler Lab and, since November 2025, serves as Vice Director of Research and Innovation. Appointed to this newly created leadership role, she brings to it the same qualities that have defined her scientific career: intellectual rigour, ambition, and a conviction that good science should find its way into the world.

Her path into cancer research began at the University of Sussex, where she graduated with a first-class BSc in Molecular Genetics. She completed her PhD at the University of Manchester, studying how tumour hypoxia undermines a cancer cell’s response to chemotherapy. That question, of how the environment surrounding a tumour shapes its behaviour and survival, became the thread connecting everything that followed. At Stanford University, where she spent four years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Radiation Oncology, she turned her focus to hypoxia-regulated metastasis, producing foundational work on how low-oxygen conditions prime tumours to spread. In 2008, she established her own independent research group at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, before bringing the lab to BRIC in 2012, becoming a full tenured Professor in 2016.

Today, the Erler Lab investigates the extracellular matrix and tumour microenvironment, asking how these physical and biochemical contexts regulate cancer’s ability to leave a primary tumour and colonise distant organs. With over 16,000 citations and an H-index of 47, Janine’s research has helped reshape how the field thinks about metastasis, establishing the extracellular matrix not as a passive scaffold but as an active driver of cancer progression and a compelling therapeutic target.

Janine is also a serial entrepreneur. She has founded three biotech companies: LOXiPharm, which developed monoclonal antibodies against LOX in cancer; LOXiGen, focused on small molecule inhibitors for fibrosis; and NEUmiRNA Therapeutics, where she lead as CEO, advancing RNA-based therapies for neurological conditions. Her ability to move fluidly between fundamental science and commercial application is rare, and it reflects a consistent belief that discoveries made at the bench should not stop there.

Beyond the lab and the boardroom, Janine is an elected member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, an Innovation Fund Denmark ambassador, and a mentor within the Danish Society for Women in Science. She leads the BRIC Innovation Working Group and represents BRIC in the EU-LIFE Technology Transfer Working Group. Her research has attracted major funding from the European Research Council, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, and the Innovation Fund Denmark, totalling over 40M DKK in competitive grants.