Research
Cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, and kidney disease are the major healthcare threats in the UAE that, together, contribute to at least two-thirds of all non-communicable mortality and take up a major part of the country's healthcare budget. Alarmingly, these diseases are predicted to occur even more frequently over the next decades.
Blood vessels
Blood vessels supply oxygen to every cell in our body. They are lined by endothelial cells. Through dysfunction or excess growth, blood vessels contribute to the disease process of cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, but also COVID-19. Through new technologies to study single cells in bulk, we can now study differences between endothelial cells in health and disease at unprecedented resolution, which could yield new treatment targets.
Mystery genes
Up to 6,000 genes--a third of the human coding genome--are “mystery” genes, i.e. without any known function. Discovering the role of these mystery genes offers a “goldmine” of biological insights and therapy development. The Leuven team at BISDI recently developed new artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools to discover mystery genes and to explore their role in tumor mouse models.
Diabetes
For diabetes patients, a key unmet need is cures for life-threatening cardiovascular complications. The discovery of new molecular insights and treatments for diabetic cardiovascular complications will be highly relevant for the UAE, where diabetes is endemic.
Performing state-of-the-art endothelial cell-geared analyses on samples from diabetic patients promises to yield new insights into disease risk and mechanisms.
Alternative immunotherapy
Endothelial cells in tumors are immunosuppressive, which impairs infiltration of immune cells inside tumors, a primary reason of why so many cancer patients are resistant against traditional immunotherapy, targeting cancer and immune cells.
We focus on discovering and silencing immunosuppressive mystery genes expressed in endothelial cells in tumors to make the cells lining the tumor's blood vessels immunostimulatory instead. Such an alternative approach to immunotherapy has been overlooked, but promises to increase the efficiency of current traditional immunotherapy approaches.