Projects
Building a next-generation precision oncology platform for childhood cancer Ghent University
Improved patient tailored, more potent and durable treatment of childhood cancer is an urgent medical need. Childhood cancers are often still treated by a ‘one-fits-all’ approach, given the limited available entry points for targeted therapy. Molecular dissection of pediatric cancers, using multiple layers of information (so-called ‘omics’) up to the single cell level, is nowadays yielding fundamental insights into novel putative targets and ...
Integrated Personalized & Precision Oncology Network (IPPON). University of Antwerp
Forwarding precision oncology by integrating cohort-derived molecular and clinical information. Ghent University
Combining molecular data and clinical annotation of tumor cohorts, now available in a public, but increasingly also in a clinical context has the potential to greatly advance clinical practice. However, the integration of these data is non-trivial. Therefore, we will develop methods to analyze such cohort-derived molecular and clinical information and apply them in the context of drug-based precision oncology.
Tenure track professorship in pediatric precision oncology Ghent University
A tenure track appointment grants one the privilege of focusing primarily on research for a period of 5 years, with a limited teaching load.
Functional Precision Oncology: Next-generation treatment rationale for glioblastoma Mapping the drug response heterogeneity using single cell protein analysis KU Leuven
Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most aggressive brain cancer in adults. In spite of intensive treatment, median survival is still only 15 months. Reasons that explain failure to develop more efficient therapies include the high invasiveness of the tumor, its complex genetics, and interpatient and intra-tumoral heterogeneity. Understanding and mapping the complexity of the different tumour cell populations and how each of these respond to therapy, ...
Real-time qPCR platform enhancing research activities within the Laboratory of Experimental Oncology and the Laboratory of Experimental Radiotherapy KU Leuven
Approaching personalized oncology with DNA methylation inference and computational epigenomics KU Leuven
Epigenomic profiles have unspent capacity for diagnostic and prognostic oncological applications. I hypothesize that computational methods to understand the key dimensions shaping tumor epigenomes – cellular heterogeneity, genome-epigenome interplay, cancer cell-of-origin and non-genetic evolution – will provide crucial personalized insights into tumor microenvironment, expression of somatic mutations, cancer emergence and progression. ...
Validation of Actionable Genomic ABerrations in a paediatric Oncology Network for Doctorate students Ghent University
High-risk neuroblastoma (HR-NB) patients undergo intensive multi-modal treatment, with over half succumbing to their disease. HR-NB cells exhibit replicative stress, and targeting DNA damage response (DDR) pathways represents a viable therapeutic option. Pharmalogical CDK12 inactivation leads to downregulation of DDR genes, selectively reducing viability of NB cells. A novel zebrafish HR-NB xenograft model for high-throughput compound testing ...