NRS Webinar- Omics in Rare Disease-From Data to Diagnosis
Welcome to the NRS webinar on Omics in Rare Disease-From Data to Diagnosis!
We are proud to invite Dr. Ewart Kuijk and Dr. Jasper van Genugten to speak on the following topics:
- Functional readouts at the single cell and single organoid level to accelerate therapy development and personalized medicine in Cystic Fibrosis;
- Decoding Immunotherapy Response in Pleural Mesothelioma: From Biomarkers to Molecular Mechanisms.
Dr. Ewart Kuijk is Assistant Professor at the Cellular Disease Models lab at the Department of Pediatric Pulmonology at the WKZ/UMC Utrecht. Ewart performed his PhD at the school of Veterinary Medicine in Utrecht, where he studied stem cells in mammalian development. After his PhD defense, he was a postdoc at the IVF clinic at the UMC Utrecht and the group of Niels Geijsen at the Hubrecht Institute. He then joined the lab of Edwin Cuppen, which was a switch from hypothesis driven research towards systems biology. In this position, Ewart applied a variety of single-cell and bulk-based sequencing technologies, to better understand genotype-phenotype relationships and to understand the mutational processes that cause genetic variation. Around 5 years ago, Ewart joined the lab of Edward Nieuwenhuis to study Very Early Onset Inflammatory Bowel Disease using patient-derived organoids. A bit more than two years ago, he moved to his current position, where his main focus is on Cystic Fibrosis, again using patient-derived cells. Ewart uses single molecule, single cell, and single organoid-based technologies to:
- Addressing key questions in gene and cell therapies
- Dissecting molecular mechanisms underlying genetic diseases
- Enabling HT screens (drugs/compounds/CRISPR)
Ewart's career has developed from fundamental research towards his current role where his focus is also on the valorization aspects of his research.
Dr. Jasper van Genugten is a translational oncology researcher at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) and the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital/Netherlands Cancer Institute (AVL-NKI). His research focuses on understanding the determinants of immunotherapy response and resistance in thoracic malignancies, including pleural mesothelioma and non-small cell lung cancer. To address these questions, he integrates multi-omics data from clinical cohorts with ex vivo lung tissue culture models.
