Projects

This project focuses on exploring the use of HAE cultures to study the treatment of viral respiratory infections. HAE cultures will be used to evaluate novel antiviral strategies to combat Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) infection and explore the kinetics of replication of different RSV virus strains. This will result in an optimized culture system to be used to characterize viral strains in a relevant ex vivo system and link viral factors ...

Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is caused by a pathological increase in pulmonary vascular resistance (PVR) and ultimately leads to right ventricular (RV) failure. On modern therapy, there is still 15% mortality within 1 year and median survival remains limited to 5-6 years, with insufficient functional improvement in many survivors. Bilateral lung transplantation (bLTx) remains the only curative option. Unfortunately, most patients are ...

Malaria remains a devastating global health problem, leading to half a million deaths per year. More than 90% of malaria cases and deaths occur in African regions, mainly in children aged under 5 years. Cerebral malaria (CM) is the most common complication and cause of death in severe Plasmodium falciparum infection. In addition to CM, malaria-associated acute respiratory distress syndrome (MA-ARDS) is also common in adult patients, ...

Infants admitted in the neonatal unit commonly present with feeding problems such as decreased oral intake and feeding intolerance. These infants may suffer from complex diseases such as prematurity or congenital malformations. The origin of these feeding problems may be disease-specific or may be secondary to many factors such as severity of the illness, concomitant medication and surgical interventions.

“Healthy” preterm ...

Background

In the past few decades, exposure to air pollution has been found to be associated with all-cause mortality, cardiovascular and respiratory morbidity, both in the short term (acute exposure) and the long term (chronic exposure). According to the most recent report by the World Health Organisation (WHO, 2014), 3.7 million deaths worldwide and per year are attributed to ambient air pollution, placing it in the top 10 of risk ...

Necrotizing Soft Tissue Infection (NSTI) is a rapidly progressive infection of – in most cases – the deep fascial layer, in a sequence of inflammation, thrombosis and necrosis, thus spreading through the soft tissue surrounding the fascia. The most frequent identified pathogen is Streptococcus pyogenes, bud mixed infections have been reported. Often, parallel to the local manifestations, the patient presents with signs of shock and urgent ...

Chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS) is characterized by mucosal inflammation in the nasal cavity and the paranasal sinuses and effects approximately 11% of the European population. CRS is generally devided into two phenotypes depending on the presence or absence of nasal polyps, namely CRS with nasal polyps (CRSwNP) and CRS without nasal polyps (CRSsNP). Despite the available treatment strategies, up to 40% of CRS patients remain uncontrolled even ...