by Charlotte Teuns

Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer mortality, worldwide and in Belgium. Prevention and early detection are considered the cornerstones to increase the chances of successful treatment and improved outcomes. There is strong scientific evidence that screening for lung cancer through an annual low-dose CT scan (LDCT) in a high-risk population of (ex-)smokers significantly reduces lung cancer mortality and is cost-effective. This implementation study will investigate the participation rate of eligible high risk (ex-)smokers in the First Line Zone (ELZ) South East Region of Antwerp (ZORA) in a LDCT screening program, combined with smoking cessation. Besides, other indicators of compliance, quality and turn-around-time will be estimated. It will give insights in the feasibility and potential challenges of implementing a LDCT lung cancer screening program in our region. This implementation project is in line with the European Commission Council recommendation of December 2022 to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of LDCT in a high-risk population. Findings from this study will contribute valuable evidence for policymakers and stakeholders. Furthermore, an implementation pilot is a prerequisite for a future high-quality population-based screening program.

by Iuliana Vintea

This study investigates ferroptosis therapy resistance, believed to be epigenetically regulated. Ferroptosis, a type of iron dependent cell death, is increasingly recognized as a promising treatment option in cancer therapy. Nevertheless, diagnostic tools that predict tumour sensitivity for ferroptosis are not yet developed. In this project, we aim to identify a “ferroptomic” epi-fingerprint, which is essential in the development of a diagnostic assay to predict ferroptosis sensitivity.

Oxford Nanopore sequencing has several advantages for this study: it allows (i) to perform native sequencing, enabling the parallel detection of modified bases (ii) to sequence long stretches of DNA and importantly (iii) to perform elegant enrichment strategies such as adaptive sampling. This enabled enrichment in around 1500 ferroptosis related genes (FRGs), which were selected based on literature.

In this research, we investigate the effect of DNA methylation transcription. In addition, machine learning algorithms will be developed to define a higher-level ferroptosis epi-signature that will allow us to predict ferroptosis sensitivity in cancer.

We are now able to show robust results where FRGs are successfully enriched in silico with a mean coverage of 30X. Starting from the epigenetic readout, we performed feature reduction with elastic net regression and finally trained our logistic regression model to be able to predict ferroptosis sensitivity of different cancer cell lines. This resulted in high accuracy predictive results.  

by Noémie Mourot 

Multiple myeloma (MM) is a hematological cancer affecting plasma cells. Despite considerable advances made over the years in the management of MM patient, patient still relapse, indicating the presence of residual disease under the level of detection and underlying the need to develop more specific approach for the diagnosis and monitoring of patients.

B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA) is a transmembrane glycoprotein involved in the proliferation, maturation, and survival of plasma cells. It has been identified as a promising therapeutical and imaging target due to its expression on the surface of malignant plasma cells and in most MM cases. We aimed to develop an anti-BCMA ImmunoPET imaging strategy for the assessment of BCMA expression and monitoring of treatment response to CAR-based cell therapies.