Videos

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.

Every 3 minutes, a woman dies of ovarian cancer somewhere in the world. "Ovarian cancer is very sneaky. Most of the patients respond positively to the therapies initially provided to them, but eventually, the cancer comes back and is much more aggressive. As a result one in two ovarian cancer patients die within 5 years after diagnosis." But what if we were able to treat ovarian cancer with a new therapy using our cells?

Did you know that 20% of all healthcare expenses are 'waste'? "We are spending large sums of money on things that don't really improve patients' health, such as overtreatment, administrative efficiencies, and so on", says Joke Borzee. To treat our financially ill healthcare sector, she is working on a scoring model to assess the overall value of treatments. Watch her explain how this would work.

Thanks to advanced proton therapy, doctors can precisely start irradiating brain tumours. Unfortunately, they do not yet dare to use this technique on tumours in the belly. Why? Because it's a bit like playing darts with a blindfold, while you have to hit a moving target, as Sophie Heymans explains in this video. She tells you about the technique she is working on to help doctors face this challenge.

Rats are our best friends. Or at least Emilie Bartsoen's. She only has to listen to her rats to know how they feel. By observing the social behaviour of rats, she also wants to help people with autism. How? She explains that to you in this video!

Do you ever wake up feeling like you have been run over by a truck? You are not alone. As many as 1 in 5 adults suffer from a sleep disorder, ranging from sleep apnoea to insomnia. With a compact, wearable device and AI, Elisabeth Heremans wants to analyse sleep problems in patients from the comfort of their own bed, instead of having them spend the night in a sleep clinic attached to a bunch of wires.

Roughly every 5 minutes someone on this planet dies of ALS, and the sad truth is that we still do not have an effective treatment to cure this disease. The problem lies in the fact that we do not fully understand what causes ALS in the first place. In his doctorate, Jimmy Beckers is trying to solve a piece of the puzzle. He is investigating whether a malfunction in our internal cellular recycling system might be linked to ALS.

Have you ever wondered how pills are made? A powder flows through a production line, falls into a hole, and gets compressed into a pill. Easy, right? And yet a lot can go wrong, as chemical engineer Margot Coppens explains. That's why she uses computer models to virtually test the powder mixtures and anticipate possible production problems.

To measure is to know. That is the credo of Michelle Laeremans (VITO). Together with a team of researchers, she monitors the health of 300 children in Mol, Dessel, and Retie (Belgium). They do this from pregnancy until the child reaches the age of 18. In this way, they map exposure to chemicals.

Anyone who has ever looked for Waldo knows how hard he is to find. In her research on lung cancer, Rebekka Van Hoof (Uhasselt - KU Leuven - VITO) faces a similar task: she is searching within more than 100,000 so-called extracellular vesicles for 2 types -say 'Waldos'- that can help detect the disease early. But she is determined to narrow her search field. How? Watch her explain it in this video. 

Do you remember Pac-Man, from that old skool computer game? Well, did you know that there are Pac-Mans in every single cell of our body? They're called enzymes. Some of these enzymes work too fast or too slow, and this can cause severe diseases. Michaela Prothiwa (KU Leuven) explains how she wants to track down these malfunctioning enzymes using a clever piece of chemistry.

What if your brain could heal itself when damaged? Science fiction? Not for the African turquoise killifish! Neuroscientist Valerie Mariën is studying this remarkable fish and how it is able to repair its brain, in the hope that in the future she will be able to help people with brain damage.