PINT OF SCIENCE FESTIVAL
19-21 MAY 2025
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The body is a complex system, with thousands of finely tuned processes all going on at once that our conscoius mind is unaware of. When these processes go wrong is where are experts for this evening get invovled, they are hear to unpack what happens when systems breakdown, the consequences for human health and what if anything can be done about it!
When the heart muscle gets tough
Ilona Cuijpers
PhD student, CMVB, KU Leuven
KU Leuven
Every year, approximately 3.6 million people are diagnosed with heart failure, a condition in which the heart is not able to pump sufficiently blood throughout the body, also referred as a “tired heart”. In this condition, the heart muscle is stiffened and is therefore not able to relax. As such, the filling of the heart with blood is reduced and less blood is pumped out to the body. Especially, aged people and people with high blood pressure, extreme overweight and/or sugar disease have a high risk of developing this condition. However, while this patient group is dramatically increasing, therapies are absent so it is of the utmost importan
The fight against your own treacherous cells
Marlies Vanden Bempt
Coordinator of the single-cell immune-oncology platform
VIB center for cancer biology
Everyone has a defense system against bad behaviour in your body: the immune system! However, cancer cells have developed ways to escape the immune system, so they can freely grow into a large tumor. Recently, a new cancer medicine was developed: Immune therapy. This drug can arm your body to attack the treacherous cancer cells, making your body fight cancer for you. However, immune therapy does not work for everyone... By investigating each individual cell in a tumor, we want to find out how we can predict for which cancer patients immune therapy is a viable treatment option, thereby saving the non-responding patients from high treatment c
