Projects
LONG-TERM SEQUENTIAL USE OF BIOLOGIC THERAPIES IN INFLAMMATORY BOWEL DISEASE: HARMLESS OR HAZARDOUS? KU Leuven
Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) are illnesses that are characterized by chronic inflammation of the gut. To prevent the development of complications and to improve quality of life it is necessary to start treatment, which often includes biologic therapies or biologicals. The latter are designed to block specific pathways in our immune system to restore the dysbalance seen in disease state and due to the chronicity of IBD they need to be ...
Biologic Characterization of Stem Cell-Derived Beta Cells Generated from Type 1 Diabetes Patients Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Interlocking synthetic biology, systems biology and artificial intelligence to develop a more efficient metabolic engineering workflow: a highly efficient biotechnological production platform for monoclonal chitooligosaccharides. Ghent University
Today, synthetic biology (SynBio) and systems biology (SysBio) are developing at an unprecedented pace into major drivers of industrial biotechnology. Despite these recent advances, the transformation of wild type organisms into highly efficient microbial cell factories (MCFs) remains a truly daunting task due to the enormous complexity of microbial cells. Typically, to steer the strain engineering process a “Design-Build-Test-Learn” (DBTL) ...
Unlocking the full potential of Microbial Synthetic Biology: an engineering discipline coming of age Ghent University
Background:
Microbial Synthetic Biology (MSB) is an emergent interdisciplinary area combining disciplines such as microbiology, biotechnology, genetic engineering, molecular biology, molecular engineering, systems biology, protein engineering, membrane science, biophysics and computer engineering. MSB applies these disciplines to engineer biological systems and microorganisms in view of improving industrial, environmental, ...
Convergent evolution of functional surfaces in biology: surface structure complexity of lizard skin Ghent University
Because they constitute the interface between the organism and its environment, biological surfaces play a vital role in many processes. Recently, new imaging techniques have uncovered that bio-surfaces sport a vast variety of microscale and nanoscale structures that are thought to tailor their interfacing functions. However, exactly how they do that, and why surface ornamentation can differ so dramatically among species, remains heavily ...
From population-based study to functional biology: combinatorial effect APOE and low-risk genetic risk factors of Alzheimer's Disease in the microglia response to amyloid pathology. University of Antwerp
Translational control in infection biology: the role of sORFs in Salmonella pathogenesis. Ghent University
High-throughput applications such as next-generation sequencing are frequently applied in modern biological and medical research allowing for comprehensive studies at the scale unattainable by classical techniques. Recent technology advancements enable protein translation measurement on the mRNA level by massive sequencing of ribosome-captured messenger RNA footprints (i.e. ribosome profiling). This project proposal is situated on the ...
Role of c-Myc-PP2A negative feedback control in liver biology: new avenues for improved treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma. KU Leuven
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a deadly cancer with limited treatment options. This project exploits our recent discovery of spontaneous HCC development in mice lacking the B'65 subunit of PP2A, a phosphatase family with tumor suppressive functions. The observed HCC phenotype was causally linked to loss of a negative feedback loop between the oncoprotein c-Myc and PP2A, which, due to PP2A inactivity, results in full-blown c-Myc ...
Autumn meeting of the Belgian Society for Cell and Developmental Biology: Endoderm and endoderm derivatives in development and disease. Vrije Universiteit Brussel
endoderm differentiates into the respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts, and gives rise to thyroid,
lung, esophagus, stomach, liver, pancreas and intestine. Fundamental studies have identified
mechanisms that govern the differentiation of the endoderm and its derived organs. Knowledge of
developmental processes sheds light on ...