Videos

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.

People who suffer a brain injury, after an accident or stroke, often face social problems. They lose friends, face problems at work and their relationships fall apart more often. But what makes social contact so difficult after a brain injury? Neuropsychologist Annemarie Stiekema lists the main insights from research for you.

Up to 25% of the cells present in lung cancer tumours are currently ignored. As such, we don't know what the role of these so-called B cells is. "It is crucial to figure that out because we cannot efficiently fight something we do not fully understand," says Pauline Bardet (VUB - VIB - FWO).

In her PhD, she wants to get to the bottom of those B cells and thus find out whether those cells are "good guys" or "bad guys".

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.

Once diagnosed with glioblastoma, a highly aggressive brain cancer, a patient has on average only 15 months to live. "This terrible statistic shows that we urgently need new treatment options," says Myrthe Mampay (VUB - FWO). In her research, she is looking for one such new treatment based on immunotherapy, in which she wants to use patient stem cells to make macrophages that attack the tumour.

People suffering from a chronic brain disorder can be helped with long-acting injectables, medication that works for a long time and no longer requires them to take pills every day. But the traditional manufacturing process of long-acting medication is complex, time-consuming, and requires a lot of energy. Snehashis Nandi investigates how long-acting injectables can be produced sustainably and efficiently. 

Drugs in pill form work quickly, but their effects wear off just as fast. That's why people with chronic conditions have to take a pill every few hours. What if we could administer drugs in a different form so that they not only work fast but also last for weeks or even months? We can achieve this with long-acting injections, as Fatima Anjum explains 'crystal' clear in this video 😉

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.

Every year, as many as 70,000 people in Belgium are told they have cancer. Studies show that exercise during treatment has a beneficial effect on the quality of life of cancer patients. And yet 70% of them move a lot less after the diagnosis than before. With 'Moving Cancer Care', Dimitri Vrancken and his colleagues tackle these questions and offer tools to get cancer patients to exercise more.

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.

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...