Prof. Dr. Laurence Boon (Belgium)

Prof. Dr. LM Boon became a Plastic Surgeon in 1996 and obtained her PhD in 2003 at the Faculty of Medicine in UCL, Brussels. She spent two years at the Children’s Hospital, Boston, Harvard Medical School, under the supervision of Prof. John B. Mulliken, to specialize in vascular anomalies. She is the Coordinator of the Multidisciplinary Vascular Anomaly Centre (VAC), Saint Luc university Hospital, Brussels, which just celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2021. She is the current Past President of the International Society for the Study of Vascular Anomalies.

Through seminal discoveries, her team actively 1) moved the discipline of confusing diagnoses, to a field with stratified diseases, 2) generated the first venous malformation animal model, and 3) demonstrated preclinically and clinically efficacy of the first molecular therapy for slow-flow vascular anomalies. She has several high impact publications, reviews, and chapters on vascular anomalies in major medical reference books, especially in dermatology and genetics. She has been an invited speaker at numerous major scientific meetings.

In 2013, she shared with Prof. Dr. M. Vikkula the INBEV-Baillet Latour Clinical Prize. She was president of the ISSVA and she is an active Member of the Royal Belgian Academy of Medicine. She is chairing with Prof. Dr. Vikkula the VASCA working group of the European Reference Networking on Vascular Anomalies (VASCern). She is currently involved in several research projects aimed at elucidating the pathophysiology of these anomalies as well as in phase I, II and III clinical trials of new medications.