The search for the origin of chromosomal abnormalities in human preimplantation embryos Vrije Universiteit Brussel
the first cleavages of the embryo. We want to study the ...
Intensive care medicine “bridges” critically ill patients to recovery. Inter-individual variability in the capacity and speed of recovery from organ failure points to a degree of genetic predisposition. However, insight in why certain patients recover and others don’t remains very limited. Organs from patients who do not recover show few if any signs of cell death. Instead, cells accumulate damaged and dysfunctional organelles, damaged ...
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the most common neurodegenerative motor disease, affecting 6.3 million people worldwide. Given the predicted increase in average population age, the number of PD patients is expected to rise and hence the social and economic burden of the disease will increase. To date, PD cannot be cured, instead therapy is directed at alleviating symptoms. A major challenge is therefore the development of disease-modifying ...
This project aims to enhance the limits for activation and follow-up of autophagy and the beneficial effect of nutritional impairment in critical illness. (FKM16)
The clinical phenotype and the outcome of Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC), the opposite ends of chronic inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), are heterogeneous and represent the result of a complex interplay of the gut microbiome with the immune system in genetically predisposed individuals. Disease management is much less heterogeneous as all patients are treated using non-specific anti-inflammatory agents, and only 30-50% ...
Yearly, invasive fungal infections (IFIs), such as candidemia and invasive aspergillosis, cause 1.7 million deaths worldwide and this number is still increasing, which can be mainly explained by the increase of the at-risk population, being immunocompromised patients, and the increased use of modern medical devices, such as implants and catheters. Mortality rates associated with IFIs are high (up to 50%) and the number of currently used ...
Despite progress in cancer therapies, there are still no effective therapies for several cancers, like liver cancers. Excitingly, my host laboratory recently made an astonishing discovery: using a mouse model for liver cancer, they discovered that genetic stimulation of regeneration by activating the transcriptional co-activator YAP in normal hepatocytes caused tumor cell death and dramatic tumor regression. Therefore, stimulating ...
The tumor suppressor P53 (also named TP53) in humans ((T)p53 in mice) is of pivotal importance for the maintenance of genome stability. About 50% of cancers involve P53 gene mutation, making P53 one of the most extensively investigated genes/proteins. p53 is a transcription factor that can (de)activate genes (“p53 targets”) by binding to specific regulatory DNA sequences. p53 activates genes involved in cell cycle arrest, DNA repair and ...