Projects

The final goal of the VIREM project is to achieve a reduction of lung and diaphragm damage in ventilated patients in intensive care units worldwide. In this way we want to increase the patient's chance of survival and shorten the length of ventilation, thereby also reducing the cost of healthcare for intensive care. Collaboration with international partners will ensure that our results can be widely used.
Achieving lung and diaphragm ...

This project focus on the understanding of gas-liquid mass transfer and the development of a gas-liquid vortex unit in the CO2 context. Fundamental experiments combined and numerical simulations can bring its design and efficiency to an unprecedented level. Therefore, advanced visualization technologies and novel numerical simulation methods will be used or developed to reveal and understand the mass transfer process between gas and liquid ...

Living systems use nanoscale organization to compartmentalize and guide the chemical processes occurring inside them. This spatiotemporal heterogeneity is thought to be a key concept for e.g. signaling specificity, yet is difficult to study as it can only be measured in the intact cell. However, at the current state of the art it is difficult to measure chemical (signaling) processes at high spatiotemporal resolution, or to measure whole-cell ...

Cells are confined by their plasma membrane (PM) which separates their content from the outside
world. Communication between cells and the outside occurs via proteins in the PM. If one compares
a cell to a house, the proteins in the cell’s PM would be the doors and windows. Doors represent
channels which can exchange molecules, such as nutrients, whereas windows represent receptors
(antennas) that allow to monitor the ...

Many important geological questions are related to the understanding of fluid flow through the pores of geological materials (rocks, sediments and soils) on the field scale. Often, these questions involve the flow of two (or more) fluids which do not mix, in which case their behavior is driven by interfaces between the fluids at the microscopic scale of the pores. The current lack of understanding of the dynamics of these interfaces inside ...

The intensive care medicine department (ICU) treat patients in life threating conditions, who usually require multi-organs support. ICU combines high clinical skills, a fully dedicated patient care system and sophisticated technology. Moreover, different physiological parameters are continuously monitored. Despite that, the ICU mortality in Europe remains around 20%. Acute brain injuries (ABI) gather most of neurological injuries that occur ...

Proteases are enzymes that cut proteins. Although some play a role in food digestion, most are involved in the regulation of specific biological processeses in the body. Aberrant protease activity contributes to the development of diseases, and proteases can therefore be used as drug targets and diagnostic markers. For example, some tumor types display an increased protease activity. If we were able to localize a particular protease and show ...

Our aim is to identify how Mx1 protein can suppress influenza A virus replication by using advanced microscopy techniques and performing functional assays.

Cardiac electrophysiology is the study of the electrical system of the heart with as main interest the diagnosis and treatment of cardiac arrhythmias, ie. heart rhythms that are too slow (bradyarrhythmias) or too fast (tachy-arrhythmias). Since the 1980’s, we have the possibility to cure patients from various forms of cardiac arrhythmias with radiofrequency catheter ablation (RFCA) procedures. During these procedures, the focus or circuit ...