Pieter Van Vlierberghe (1980) is associated with the Department of Pediatrics and Genetics at the Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine. He received his PhD in 2008 from Erasmus University (Rotterdam, The Netherlands) on molecular genetic insights in childhood leukaemia. Next, he moved to the Institute for Cancer Genetics at Columbia University (New York, USA) to work as a postdoctoral fellow from 2008-2012. In 2013, he returned to Belgium with an Odysseus fellowship from the Research Foundation Flanders and initiated an independent research program on the biology of human leukaemia in the Center For Medical Genetics at Ghent University.
Dynamic interplay between DNA methylation, histone modifications and super enhancer activity in normal T cells and during malignant T cell transformation (EpiTALL)
Childhood leukaemia is currently still treated using high-dose chemotherapy. Unfortunately, these intensive treatment regimens are often associated with considerable side effects at later age, including infertility, loss of intellectual capacity and the development of secondary tumors. The ERC project, EPITALL, aims to unravel the epigenomic landscape of childhood leukaemia as a prerequisite for the identification of less toxic drugs for the treatment of this aggressive subtype of human cancer.
