Four ERC Consolidator Grants for KU Leuven researchers

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded its Consolidator Grants. Four KU Leuven researchers are among this year’s recipients in Belgium: breast cancer researcher Christine Desmedt, computer scientist Tias Guns, chemical engineer Simon Kuhn, and psychiatrist Lukas Van Oudenhove.

ERC Consolidator Grants provide funding for excellent researchers with 7 to 12 years of post-PhD experience. The grants are awarded for a five-year period and may be worth up to € 2 million.

Christine Desmedt: the link between breast cancer and obesity

Associate Professor Christine Desmedt works at the Department of Oncology at KU Leuven. She is also the head of the Laboratory for Translational Breast Cancer Research and a member of the Leuven Cancer Institute (LKI) at KU Leuven. Her ERC project is called FAT-BC.

“We want to find out what the link is between breast cancer and obesity. In the West, half of all women are overweight or obese, and this percentage increases after menopause. There is evidence that overweight and obesity have an impact on the biological aspects of cancer, the effectiveness of treatments and the prognosis of patients, but the link between both health problems has not yet been sufficiently studied.”

“My team and I will analyse existing data on thousands of tumours, focussing, among other things, on links between certain mutations and patients’ body mass index (BMI). However, BMI isn’t such an accurate indicator of adiposity, which is why we are also going to collect new data and consider, among other things, patients’ fat composition and lifestyle.”

“One in eight women will experience breast cancer at one point in their lives. With our research we hope to contribute to better personalised treatments.”

Tias Guns: optimisation software that learns from its environment and users

Associate Professor Tias Guns works at the Department of Computer Science at KU Leuven and is a member of the KU Leuven Institute Leuven.AI. His ERC project is called CHAT-Opt.

“We want to create smarter optimisation software for vehicle routing or industrial automation. The current software often suggests solutions that are efficient but don’t always take users’ preferences into account. Someone who delivers postal parcels, for instance, may deviate from the proposed route due to his previous experiences in a specific neighbourhood. The current systems only take such elements into account if they are manually adjusted. We have recently started using machine learning to make the software learn from both the context – for instance, how quickly a parking spot is typically found – and the user’s preferences. We’re going to explore this further.”

“Ultimately, we want to make it possible to initiate some sort of dialogue between the user and the smart software, so that the user can request and suggest alternatives, and ask the system why it makes certain choices, because it may have a good reason to do so”.

Simon Kuhn: reactors for a more sustainable chemical industry

Professor Simon Kuhn works at the Department of Chemical Engineering at KU Leuven and is a member of the KU Leuven Institute SIM2. His ERC project is called MicroDisco.

“My team and I want to develop novel reactors for chemical manufacturing. Electro- and photochemical reactors are more sustainable than other types because they don’t involve any heating up and can do without rare-precious-metal catalysts – you just need electricity. The problem with current reactors, however, is that their productivity is too low. We want to make the reactors more effective by using ultrasound, sound waves with frequencies that are too high for humans to hear.

In my ERC Starting Grant project, we already used sound waves to prevent small chemical reactors from clogging up

. In this new project, we will go beyond this concept and use ultrasound to overcome transport and throughput limitations in microreactors.”

Lukas Van Oudenhove: the impact of gut bacteria on emotions

Lukas Van Oudenhove is an associate professor at the Translational Research in Gastrointestinal Disorders unit (TARGID) and a member of the Leuven Brain Institute (LBI) at KU Leuven. He is also the head Head of the Laboratory for Brain-Gut Axis Studies (LaBGAS). His ERC project is called MOODBUGS.

“My team and I are going to study mechanisms that allow bacteria in our gastrointestinal tract, especially in the large intestine, to influence psychological processes in our brain, and particularly our response to psychosocial stress and fear. The first part will be a longitudinal study in which we examine the composition of our subjects’ gut bacteria and their psychological condition. In the other three parts we will manipulate two important mechanisms. What exactly is the role of inflammation processes? And is it possible to attenuate psychosocial stress or fear by administering short-chain fatty acids via capsules that only dissolve in the large intestine? That’s what we want to find out.”

“To be clear: we’re not talking about miracle remedies here. The link between gut bacteria and mental health is obviously more complex than ‘eat more fibres and cure your depression’. This nuance is crucial: we have to be careful that we, as scientists, are not overly optimistic in our communication because that does not help anyone. This project will use solid research to refine our knowledge on the connection between food and mental health.”

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