top of page

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.

Prospective Clinical Translation:

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 and inventions have so far resulted in retrospective/prospective clinical testing (of our blood-based sFIS biomarker assay) and initiation of new clinical trials, scheduled in the coming 2 years (involving next-generation anticancer vaccines for glioblastoma patients, supported by the EU Mission Cancer grant, for details click here!).

bottom of page