Seminari VHIR - Dra. Greetje Vande Velde "A multimodal imaging toolbox for tracking disease progression and host response in experimental models of lung pathology"

Dra. Greetje Vande Velde, Assistant Professor in Preclinical Multimodal Imaging at the Department of Imaging and Pathology, Faculty of Medicine, KU Leuven - University of Leuven, Belgium

"A multimodal imaging toolbox for tracking disease progression and host response in experimental models of lung pathology"

Lung diseases such as for example fibrosis, COPD and infection are important life-threatening conditions. They deteriorate quality of life, while our knowledge on etiology and effective treatment options still contains important gaps. Investigators typically rely on end-stage procedures that are useful, but provide only a snapshot of disease processes that are essentially dynamic in time and space. Nevertheless, accurately evaluating animal models mimicking human disease is vital when translating mouse study results to patients. Our working hypothesis is that technology allowing to repeatedly evaluate host response (inflammation, tissue remodeling) and disease progression is indispensable to gain better insight into the dynamics of the pathology and treatment effects. Non-invasive imaging is the clinical standard and has enormous, yet underexploited benefits for research, too. We develop groundbreaking integrated imaging approaches (micro-CT, MR & optical imaging) that enable us to acquire novel observations and insights disease progression and therapy effects in live animal models of lung diseases. This resulted in new physiological and functional imaging-derived biomarkers that better reflect the pathology and therapy efficacy. Thereby we aim to unravel the unknowns regarding causes of onset and progression of pathogenic processes and host response, in order to identify novel therapeutic targets. This ultimately improves patient care, and immediately reduces manifold the amount of animals needed for lung research

Host: VHIR Pneumology research group, mj.cruz@vhir.org