Full publication list:
LABORATORY OF
CELL STRESS & IMMUNITY
Valorization and Socio-economic Impact
Our lab believes in actively valorizing and translating our research deliverables to maximize societal and economic impact of our scientific research. This entails exciting opportunities like translating our research toward novel clinical trials, patenting our novel inventions, and exploring industrial collaborations. In long-term our lab also hopes to pursue technology transfer opportunities as well as spin-off creation, efforts for which are already in motion.
Patenting & Inventions:
Click on above image to go to a YouTube video introducing our sFIS biomarker assay!
Novel blood-based biomarkers for immuno-oncology: Our lab created a “first-in-class” serum functional immunodynamics status (sFIS) assay, wherein in vitro assessment of serum-induced myeloid NFkB and/or interferon (IFN) response-signaling can be performed to “mimic” in situ patient’s serum immune-biology. This assays's performance in anticipating patient prognosis and immunotherapy-relevant stratification has been confirmed for patients with ovarian cancer, lung cancer and breast cancer.
>> For patent information, click here!
>> For simplified technology offering statement, click here!​
Industrial Collaborations:
Novel tumoural biomarkers for immuno-oncology: Our lab created a number of innovative computational or artificial intelligence (AI) based methods, resources or algorithms for biomarker-relevant assessment of cancer patient's tumoural multi-omics and/or spatial data. These biomarker's performance have been confirmed for various cancer types. Based on these, our lab has several ongoing collaborative research projects with various biotech and pharmaceutical industry partners. Some resources and tools related to these initiatives are also publicly accessible:
This is one of the first and most comprehensive multi-omics and spatial biomarker workflow for mapping clinically-relevant CD8+T cell states in cancer patient samples. Click on above image to go to the Synapse Database page of this project.
This is the first AI-based immuno-stratification tool for colorectal cancer (CRC) patients, based on single-cell CD8+T cell states in tumour samples. Click on above image to go to the Synapse Database page of this project.
This is the first multi-omics driven AI-based immuno-stratification tool for renal cell carcinoma (RCC) patients, based on bulk omics, single-cell and spatial mapping of tumour samples as well as HLA-genotyping of blood samples. Click on above image to go to the Synapse Database page of this project.
Clinical translation of our research:
High impact immuno-oncology research mandates testing in prospective clinical settings. To accomplish this our lab constantly interacts with oncologists both at home (e.g., University Hospital Leuven/UZ Leuven, Belgium) and abroad (e.g., Heinrich Heine University Hospital, Germany; MAASTRO, Netherlands). Our research or inventions have so far resulted:
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Retrospective & prospective clinical validation of our novel blood-based sFIS biomarker assay for patients with various cancers (Sprooten et al. Oncoimmunology 2022), including ovarian cancer (Sprooten et al. J Immunother Cancer 2021), lung cancer (Vaes et al. Cancers 2021) and breast cancer (Lambrechts et al. Genes & Immunity 2023).​
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Two novel anticancer vaccination clinical trials, scheduled to start in the coming 2 years (involving next-generation dendritic cell vaccines for glioblastoma patients in combinatorial immunotherapy setting), supported by the EU Mission Cancer grant. For details, click here
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An innovative multi-center pan-Belgium clinical trial for novel mode-of-application of SoC immunotherapy for renal cell carcinoma (RCC) patients, scheduled to start in the coming 1 year, led by UZ Leuven.