Specialization
Medical Microbiology / Clinical Virology (MD PhD)
Focus of research
Most of my research since my PhD in 2008 has focused on hepatitis C virus (HCV), which has resulted in a current productive research line, encompassing several aspects of HCV infection – from epidemiology to clinical and fundamental virological research - and which is embedded in a multidisciplinary network of institutional, national and international collaborations.
I have been involved in several phase 1 and 2 trials with protease inhibitors or other candidate drugs. These clinical trials led to several virological ancillary studies, styding HCV resistance to direct acting antivirals.
A second research topic has been the new HCV epidemic in HIV infected MSM. Together with Prof. Dr. Prins, from the Public Health Service from Amsterdam in 2008 we successfully applied for a grant from the AIDS Fund to start the MOSAIC cohort, a multicenter cohort with the objective to study the sequellae of acute Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection in this patient group.An interesting novel observation within this cohort was the partial immunity we observed against reinfection with the same genotype. To investigate this further we started a collaboration with Prof. Spits and Dr. Beaumont from AIMM therapeutics, with the ultimate goal of developing monoclonal antibodies against HCV (funded by the dutch government)
To obtain a more comprehensive understanding of protective immunity against HCV, transcriptomics, innate immunity and T-cell responses in the same frequently exposed non-chronic drug users from the ACS will be studied by groups we collaborate with (the group o Dr. Boonstra from the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam).
Besides the topics described above I also initiated and participated studies on the molecular epidemiology of HCV. Part of this work has been done in collaboration with Prof. Pybus from Oxford University and part with Dr. T van der Laar, from the Free University of Amsterdam.