News - FWO Dorien

FWO postdoctoral fellowship for Dr. Dorien Imberechts

We are proud to announce that Dr. Dorien Imberechts has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) .

This is a remarkable achievement: of the 1,308 applications submitted this year, only 211 were approved — a success rate of 16.1% .

Dr. Imberechts is a postdoctoral researcher at the Molecular Biodiscovery Lab , part of the Leuven Children's Epilepsy Center . Her research contributes to improving the diagnosis and treatment of epilepsy in children.

Below you will find more information about her research project.

Project

This project will investigate how new ways to treat epilepsy can be developed, particularly for patients who do not respond to current medications. New targets that can help reduce epileptic seizures have previously been discovered and tested in a zebrafish model. These targets will now be studied further to develop genetic therapies that can modify or even stop the progression of the disease. First, attempts will be made to disable these targets in human cells in the lab, to see if this also works with human proteins. Then, the project will look to see if this helps with epileptic features in cultured human brain cells. In addition, the effects of these genetic therapies will be tested in cultured mini-brains (brain organoids) and in mice, to provide evidence that the treatment has potential for future use in humans. These steps will aim to improve treatment for a range of patients with debilitating epilepsy and offer new hope to patients who currently have few treatment options.

What are genetic therapies?

“Genetic therapies are treatments that try to tackle a disease by changing something in a person’s genetic material (DNA). Our DNA contains all the instructions that determine how our body works. Sometimes there is an error in it, which makes someone sick or makes them more likely to get sick. With genetic therapy, scientists try to correct, replace or switch off that error. This is often done by using a harmless virus as a ‘carrier’ to bring the good piece of genetic material to the cells. The goal is not just to combat the symptoms, but to tackle the cause of the disease at the source. That is why genetic therapies offer a lot of hope for diseases that are difficult or impossible to treat with regular medicine.”