Projects

This work focuses on the identification of disease-causing genetic variants in paediatric patients with primary immunodeficiency (PID) and/or autoimmune/autoinflammatory disease. Although paediatric immune pathology is rare, these disorders are associated with a high morbidity and mortality and decreased quality of life. Treatment is often accompanied with serious side-effects and can hold risks on its own. Understanding the genetic cause of ...

During the 20th century coal workers’ pneumoconiosis—or anthraco-silicosis—and asbestos-related diseases were the major occupational respiratory diseases among Belgian workers, both in terms of public health impact as well as public visibility. Except for asbestos-induced mesothelioma, the occurrence of these occupational diseases has been declining in recent decades, due to improved prevention but to a large extent also because many ...

This PhD is part of the EXIMIOUS H2020 Human exposome project. The overall objective is to bring a new way of assessing the human exposome by combining innovative ways of characterizing and quantifying multiple environmental exposures (exposomics) and mapping exposure-induced immune effects (immunomics). In both healthy exposed workers cohorts (to solvents, silica particles and biological sensitizers) and in occupational disease cohorts ...

Sarcoidosis is a systemic disease of unknown etiology. It is a moderately frequent disease (annual incidence of 1 to 35 per 100,000 adults) characterized by the development of granulomas, mainly in the lung and lymph nodes. Although the etiology is unknown, there are strong indications that environmental exposures, mainly in the workplace, may be involved in causing or triggering the disease. Thus, sensitization to beryllium may lead to a ...

Uveitis or intraocular inflammation has many causes, such as infections or autoimmunity. The exact pathophysiological mechanism in most forms of autoimmune uveitis has not yet been fully elucidated. In most studies, non-infectious uveitis is considered and treated as a homogeneous group, despite the wide variation in presentation, etiology, pathophysiology and response to treatment. Birdshot uveitis is a rare form of posterior uveitis with ...

Up to thirty percent of patients with early breast cancer (BC) will eventually develop metastases. This results in an ongoing search for treatments to improve the long-term survival of these patients. Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) are one promising type of therapeutic targets and have shown good results in malignancies as melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer. In BC, and especially in triple negative BC (TNBC), a clinical benefit for ...