Videos

Some 300,000 people overcame cancer in Belgium in the past decade. Great news, but there is a downside: chemotherapy can cause permanent damage to the sense of hearing and balance, leading to hearing loss, tinnitus, or balance problems. To better identify the problem, Heleen Vander Biest (UGent) will test patients' ears just before starting, during, and after chemotherapy.

If you get a glioblastoma, you usually only have about 15 months to live.This malignant tumour spreads rapidly through the brain and unfortunately cannot be cured. Yanti De Visser is working on a personalised treatment to already slow down the brain tumour - with success. "The first results show that our approach has the potential to extend patients' lives by years, rather than months," she says.

When removing a kidney tumor, a surgeon has just 20 minutes to do the job. During the operation, the surgeon has to cut off the blood supply to the kidney to avoid a true blood bath. But if the kidney is without blood for too long, too much of it will die off, causing the kidney to malfunction. Using mathematical models, Saar Vermijs aims to help surgeons in their race against the clock...

Today, we can treat cancer better than ever. Yet some cancer types remain very difficult to fight. Such is the case of glioblastoma, a highly aggressive brain cancer in which only 7 in 100 patients are still alive five years after diagnosis. Hoping to help glioblastoma get small, Joke Deschildre doctored a sophisticated strategy to attack cancer cells.

Cancer is a sneaky disease. For instance, cancer cells sometimes manage to disguise themselves, outrunning our immune system. Gils Roex (UAntwerpen - FWO) explains how equipping our white blood cells with a cleverly designed CAR could well help win the race against blood cancer. Want to know more? Fasten your seatbelts & watch the video 🏎

Radiation can save the lives of people with head and neck cancer. Unfortunately, many patients develop swallowing disorders as a result of the treatment, which makes it impossible for them to eat solid food. Leen Van den Steen (UAntwerpen - UZA) wants to help them. How? With tongue strength training.

Thanks to new radiotherapy techniques, more and more patients with head and neck cancer are surviving. But for 70% of them, this radiation causes chronic swallowing problems, making it difficult to eat and drink. Hanne Massonet hopes to help them enjoy food and drink again by training their tongue, mouth, and throat muscles.

As if developing a cancer drug is not difficult enough, you still have to successfully get that medicine to the tumor. Tim Bomberna (Ghent University) explains how computer simulations show us the way.

It is a relatively new and promising path in cancer research: the reuse of old, non-cancer drugs. In her PhD, Laurie Freire Boullosa focuses on an old rheumatism pill and examines whether it can be used as a weapon against cancer.

Jade Pattyn (UAntwerp) wants to make cervical cancer extremely rare. She is working on an alternative to detect cervical cancer more easy: via a simple urine sample instead of a smear. As she states: "many women will agree with me: there are nicer places to lay down than in your doctor's chair"

A cancer patient's blood contains valuable information about the cancer tumor, which can help determine the best treatment. However, in order to extract that information properly from the blood in the laboratory, the blood samples need to be treated carefully. Laure Sorber developed a manual for this.

Waiting for results after a medical examination often causes stress and uncertainty, especially in cancer patients. That is why Elien De Thaye is working on a method to determine the effect of a chemo treatment on people with peritoneal cancer more quickly on the basis of a so-called marker in the blood.