Flow cytometry Core Manager job vacant

The University of Leuven Flow Cytometry Core is currently looking for a unit manager. Extensive experience in operating BD FACS machines is essential. Details on Nature Jobs. 

AIG lab in the news

from Knack

Being a post-doc means...

...you love science more than an income.

Research topics in the lab

As defined by the titles from our papers:

Henceforth, we shall be known as the "Mouse-Thymus-Autoimmune-Treg-microRNA laboratory".

Journals

The journals the lab publishes in:

Coauthors

An interesting idea from our head of Department - all of my coauthors in a word cloud:

Clinical trials recruitment

Recruitment into clinical trials is an extremely problematic question with regards to ethics. Generally, participation in a clinical trial is a (minor) risk for the individual, but an enormous (potential) gain to society. In the past, this dilemma was "solved" by force - running clinical trials on prisoners, the mentally disabled, the poor, residents of third world countries and generally any population that was disenfranchised. This unethical behaviour is now widely condemned and has been illegal now for a long time.

So how then are patients recruited for clinical trials? Essentially the safeguard for ethics is the principle of volunteering with informed consent. In certain specific cases patients may volunteer  for the possibility of personal gain, such as a trial of a novel medication for an untreatable disease, but generally the motivation is, and should be, altruism. Clearly this is a vast improvement, but even this solution is not perfect. How do you do pediatric trials? You need the informed consent of the guardian, since the actual participant cannot give it. Can anyone really be "informed" of the risks without sufficient medical training? What about indirect coercion? It is illegal to force an unproven drug onto patients, but what about the case of a patient who does not have access to the normal standard of care? For them the only option might be the unproven drug, and in fact this does occur widely in the US and the developing world where universal health care is not available.

Finally, there is the issue of payment. It may make sense to pay for participation, but in that case the participant is not a volunteer and it opens the door to financial coercion. Yet if only unpaid volunteers are allowed, large demographic groups become under-represented in studies due to the inability to afford time off and transport costs involved in volunteering. To balance these conflicting interests, the ethical and legal rule in clinical trials is that you cannot pay volunteers, not provide a financial reward. You can, however, compensate them for their time and expenses. 

In other words, this is not how to recruit volunteers:

The UZ Leuven ethics committee really should take a walk around campus and look at the clinical trials recruitment flyers pinned up.

In the news: Flanders Today

Q&A

Professor Adrian Liston

Professor Adrian Liston of life sciences research institute VIB headed the Belgian-Australian research team that discovered the genetics determining the strength of the immune system.

Which missing link in the immune system did you find? 
We focused on the regulatory T cells, which determine how our immune system reacts to possible health threats. In short, these T cells are in charge of the activity of white blood cells – the cells that defend us against viruses. When there are not enough regulatory T cells, our immune system can be overactive and cause allergies or autoimmune diseases such as diabetes and arthritis. In the opposite case, an underactive immune system allows infections and tumours to grow. We have now identified the genetic programme that sets the number of regulatory T cells, which should help us to keep the immune system ideally balanced.

Until now, you have worked with genetically modified mice 
Yes; the next step is to design and test drugs for humans. We are contacting academic research groups and pharmaceutical companies. Basic medicine can be developed in a time span of five years, but the clinical trials to perfect the working of the drugs can take another 10 years. In the near future, our findings will hopefully help, for example, to kill off the remaining cancer cells after chemotherapy. Later, we hope to develop the means to give an 80-year-old back an immune system that is as strong as that of a healthy teenager.

Was the Australian connection coincidental? 
No, I have Australian roots and finished my PhD at the Australian National University in Canberra. During my research there, I collaborated with experts, including the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne. Four Australian scientists from this institute took part in this recent research project. The team in Flanders consisted of seven researchers at the Autoimmune Genetics Laboratory of VIB and the University of Leuven. Our project lasted four years and was funded by the Flemish Agency for Innovation through Science and Technology and the European Research Council. The results were published in the scientific journal Nature Immunology.

Interview by Andy Furniere

(see original in Flanders Today)

Scientists discover molecular pathway that controls the strength of the immune system

Researchers led by Adrian Liston at VIB and the University of Leuven have discovered the genes that control the number of regulatory T cells in the body, a critical determinant for setting the strength of immune responses. This discovery may be an important starting point for the development of new drugs for the treatment of diseases of the immune system. The research has been published by the prestigious journal Nature Immunology.

In ideal circumstances the immune system is in balance, protecting us from infections and keeping us healthy. This balance can be disrupted, causing diseases of the immune system. An underactive immune system allows infections and tumours to grow, while an overactive immune system can drive allergies and autoimmune diseases such as diabetes and arthritis.

Regulatory T cells are a type of white blood cells that are specialised to keep the immune system in balance. To find out how the right level of balance is achieved, Adrian Liston, an expert in autoimmunity, teamed up with an Australian research group headed by Daniel Gray, an expert on cell death at Australia’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. In a 4 year research project funded by the IWT (agency for Innovation by Science and Technology) and the European Research Council, the two research groups found a network of genetic control that determined whether regulatory T cells lived or died, setting the level of immune activity in mice. The genes involved are almost unchanged between mice and humans, providing strong hope that the same pathway is active in patients.

“By working out the genetic control mechanism over regulatory T cell numbers we create a real challenge and opportunity for pharmaceutical researchers”, said Professor Liston. “We now have the blueprint for controlling the level of immune activation. The next step is to identify drugs which influence this system so that we can rectify disturbances when they occur. In theory, such drugs could be used to combat everything from cancer (when the immune system needs to be stimulated to clear cancer cells) to allergies and autoimmune diseases (when the immune system needs to be inhibited).”

(klik voor Nederlands)

Relevant scientific publication

The study is published in the leading journal Nature Immunology:

Update on Tuesday, July 16, 2013 at 11:13AM by Adrian Liston

Covered in ScienceDaily and SciCasts. Also now in Greek.

Sex discrimination in academia - Flanders edition

This is a very interesting article about the sex discrimination in academia in Flanders. In Flanders only 11% of professorships are held by women, making Flanders one of the worst regions in the EU for sex equality in academia. The "glass ceiling index" has been calculated for Belgium as a whole at 2.25, meaning that it is 2.25 times harder for a woman to get a professorship than a man - again, almost the worst value in the EU. 

As the largest and oldest university in Belgium, KU Leuven bears a great deal of responsibility for this situation. Despite 600 years of history, KU Leuven has never had a female Rector. Even in Biomedical Sciences, a field dominated by women at the graduate level, only 25% of professors are female, and the situation gets much worse in the traditionally male-dominated areas. Worst of all, despite performing so badly in this area, the university has no systematic policy directives to even start to correct the problem. To try to compete in an international high performance field while ignoring half of the available talent is absurd, to say the least.

Is this a cut-and-dried case of blatant sexism? In consideration, I would suggest probably not. The effect is certainly sexist, women are not getting opportunities given to men. The primary cause, however, is probably not so much sexism as conservatism. Marc Hooghe (KU Leuven) says "What Belgian universities still have is this kind of closed-shop attitude", where old white men pick people who look like themselves for the next generation academia. Alison Woodward (VUB) points out "In Belgium, no one knows about two-thirds of the jobs. How did that guy get it?" and notes that this old boys' club excludes not only women, but also foreigners and ethnic minorities. So rather than just trying to improve parental issues*, perhaps Flemish universities should instead focus on open merit-based hiring. If women are just given a truly equal chance, I have no doubt that soon they will hold at least 50% of positions.

* One of my pet peeves, as the data showing that having a child is detrimental to women but not men is not a cause of discrimination - it is an effect of discrimination. If men actually did half the parenting, then parental issues would have absolutely no effect on sex equality. By all means, try to make child raising easier, just don't think that this alone creates sex equality.