Bart Lambrecht - ERStress

Onderstaande beschrijving is in het Engels:

Bart N. Lambrecht obtained an MD (1993) and PhD (1999) in Medicine at Ugent and specialized in Pulmonary Medicine (2002) at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

In 2005 he became Professor of Medicine at ErasmusMC, and in 2007 returned to Belgium on an Odysseus grant of the Flemish government, and became professor of Pulmonary Medicine at UGent and UZ Gent.

In 2012 he became director of the VIB Inflammation Research Centre (IRC) in Gent.

He is an ERC grant awardee and serves as associate editor of Mucosal Immunology, Trends in Immunology and advisory editor of Journal of Experimental Medicine.  He has (co)authored 180 papers in the field of asthma and allergy.  The thematic area of his group is centered around unravelling the role of antigen presenting cells in the lungs.

Contact: Bart.Lambrecht@UGent.be

Publications: https://biblio.ugent.be/person/801000968239

Role of Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress in dendritic cells and immune-mediated lung diseases (ERStress)

Dendritic cells play crucial roles in the regulation of immunity and in the pathogenesis of many inflammatory lung diseases. These cells react to exogenous and endogenous danger signals. Lung cells of mice and patients exposed to environmental triggers of lung disease like allergens, cigarette smoke, fine dust particles or microbes often accumulate unfolded proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), leading to an adaptive unfolded protein response (UPR) or to signs of ER stress. It has been shown that dendritic cells express transcription factors involved in the UPR. Based on preliminary experiments and on my interpretation of the state-of-the-art in the cell biology of ER stress and lung biology. I hypothesize that the presence of unfolded proteins in the ER is a crucial endogenous danger signal that is vital to understanding the biology of lung dendritic cells and their involvement in inflammatory lung diseases. This knowledge on how ER stress regulates dendritic cell function could be employed for the development of new drugs for inflammatory lung diseases. The objective of the program is to gain knowledge based on the role of ER stress in the initiation of inflammatory lung diseases and more specifically in the biology of lung dendritic cells.