Poster Prizes at VIB.AI and NBCNS

November was again a month full of prizes. First, Joachim took home the poster prize at the 14th NBCNS (Network for Neuroblastoma and CNS Tumor Research in Children) with his poster on spatial transcriptomics in human neuroblastoma. Later that month, Tom obtained the runner-up poster award at the Inaugural VIB.AI conference held in Mechelen with a poster on TP53 DNA mutation prediction from spatial transcriptomics data using neural networks. Congratulations to both!

  Nov 20, 2024

  Tom Luijts

Dr. Jonatan Gabre

On September 23th, Dr. Gabre defended his PhD in front of an audience of experts, family, friends and colleagues. He presented his research entitled 'Computational approaches to facilitate the identification of novel therapeutic targets in Neuroblastoma and other ALK-driver cancers". During his PhD, Jonatan made important contributions to open data science and reproducibility with the development of the CLEAN web app. By the end of the evening, he was awarded the title 'Doctor in Health Sciences'. Congratulations Dr. Gabre!

  Sep 23, 2024

  Tom Luijts

Two more conferences were attended in June by different lab members. First, Tom presented his poster at the yearly VIB Spatial Omics conference here in Ghent. On june 18th, Jimmy and Arne travelled to London for the Somatic Evolutation and Tumor Microenvironment (SETM) symposium 2024 at the Francis Crick Institute.

  Jun 20, 2024

  Tom Luijts

The past 7 days proved busy for the CCGG lab. Our 3 medical master students presented a poster on their sampling efforts at the Faculty Research Day. The next day, Peter Merseburger presented his research on spatial transciptomics in neuroblastoma at the 6th Neuroblastome Research Symposium held in Cambridge. Not to be outdone, Joachim Siaw clinched the poster prize at  the Research Symposium organized by the UGent department of Human Structure and Repair.

  Mar 27, 2024

  Tom Luijts

The Cell Line Explorer App for Neuroblastoma (CLEAN) is now publicly accessible. Jonatan Gabre and colleagues made an interactive web application to facilitate neuroblastoma research. We aim to make all published Neuroblastoma RNA-Seq and phosphoproteomic dataset readily and easily available for anyone in the field.

  Dec 28, 2023

  Jonatan Gabre

All lab members attended the 2023 EMBL Cancer Genomics Conference in at the EMBL Advanced Training Centre in Heidelberg. During the event, we participated with 5 different posters, among which the poster of Arne Claeys earned the prestigious poster award! The diverse array of speakers and posters that provided state-of-the-art and often unpublished insights, gave us valuable new ideas and inspiration to apply in our own research.

  Nov 15-17, 2023

  Tom Luijts

Recent work from the Cuppen lab demonstrated that genetic immune escape is present in minimally 25% of tumors and loss of the HLA allele is the main mechanism. Prof. Jimmy Van den Eynden put these results into perspective in a Nature Genetics News and Views article.

  May 10, 2023

  Tom Luijts

In a Letter to The Editor of Cancer Research we demonstrated that previously perceived immunoediting signals are false.
Our main concerns:

1. When neoantigen predictions are solely based on HLA affinities, the very low prediction accuracy makes every immunoediting signal extremely unlikely.
2. Proteins translated from non-expressed genes have stronger average HLA affinities. This is not selection but simple biochemistry!
3. Naïve data filtering = asking for problems. When only 10% of mutations are neoantigenic, removing samples without these mutations is problematic in tumors with low TMB.

  Mar 15, 2023

  Tom Luijts

Congratulations to Dr. Joachim Siaw for receiving the CRIG Young Investigator Proof-of-Concept Project Grant for his research project. This will allow him to investigate the therapeutic efficacy of RUVBL1/2 inhibition in neuroblastoma mice models and determine the spatial signaling dynamics in the tumor microenvironment.

  March 24, 2023

  Tom Luijts

We attended the 184st meeting of the Nederlandse Anatomen Vereniging in Lunteren (Netherlands). Tom Luijts gave a 30 minute speech about the link between whole body donors and his project on early tumor evolution.

  Jan 6 - Jan 7, 2023

  Tom Luijts

Four of our lab member attended the thirteenth Neuroblastoma and CNS (NBCNS) meeting in Gothenburg. 

  Nov 8, 2022

  Tom Luijts

Lab BBQ 2022

This September, Jimmy treated the lab to the yearly lab BBQ at his home.

  Sep 2, 2022

  Tom Luijts