Personal information
Biography
I am trained as an immunologist and am currently working in the field of infectious diseases. Understanding host pathogen interactions is key to improve vaccination strategies or implement novel therapies.
My main interest are infections with mycobacteria such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), a pathogen still claiming more than 4000 lives daily. Mtb manipulates host immunity in multiple ways, and despite decades of research it is still not clear which components are essential for protective immunity. I am in particular interested in the functional contribution of the different immune players to elimination of Mtb. In my team, we study various T cells subsets with specific reactivity against Mtb, including the 'donor-unrestricted T-cells' restricted via HLA-E. I think HLA-E is an interesting vaccination target due to its low level of polymorphism, its relative resistance to HIV mediated downregulation and abundant presentation of Mtb epitopes.
Secondly, we work on functional assays that measure the actual capacity of the immune system to control mycobacterial outgrowth. Using these unbiased assays we already identified novel paths of interaction between non-classical monocytes and T-cells. Additional work is ongoing to unravel these functionally relevant pathways in more details. In this work, we look in great detail into innate-adaptive immune crosstalk, including processes like trained immunity as these are frequently the result of mycobacterial exposure or vaccination with BCG.
Thirdly, we have a strong interest in the functional role of antibodies and B-cells in elimination of Mtb. Patients along the continuum from TB infection, disease and cure have functionally very different antibodies, for which we currently determine the contribution to disease resolution.
Finally, we are interested in the contribution of the lung epithelium in modulating the immune response towards mycobacteria, and therefore recently initiated advanced epithelial cell culture models in conjunction with mycobacterial infection and introduction of dedicated immune subsets.
Our work primarily focusses on human immune responses to Mtb, during different stages of infection, but also following routine BCG vaccination or novel experimental TB vaccination.
As immunologist, with expertise and network in the infectious disease field, the SARS-CoV2 pandemic was a very interesting experience. I am involved in the large LUMC based longitudinal Covid study (Beat-Covid) which includes many different aspects of immunology but also metabolism and coagulation. Since my team measured inflammatory profiles I am involved in most of the follow up data analyses.
Secondly, during the SARS-CoV2 pandemic, the century old vaccine against TB, BCG was used as emergency preventive vaccination against Covid in health care workers as well as vulnerable elderly. I participated in 2 of these nation wide studies and using those samples we aim to link the functional immune activation elicited by BCG to subsequent adaptive immune responses to SARS-CoV2.
I am active member of the Collaboration for TB Vaccine Discovery (CTVD) of the Bill&Melinda Gates Foundation and the Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative (TBVI). These communities helped me to develop very extensive networks of collaborators.