Saint-Luc Foundation (Belgium)
Since 1986, the Saint-Luc Foundation’s mission has been to develop and coordinate the sponsorship and fundraising activities of the Cliniques universitaires Saint-Luc (CuSL), one of the most important academic hospitals in Belgium.
In 2020/2021, the Eurofins Foundation donated to the research project “Colorectal cancers: make treatments effective by immunotherapy”, led by Professor Marc Van den Eynde. Colorectal cancer (CRC) is common, has high mortality rates, and does not benefit from immunotherapy treatment. This project aims to understand CRC’s resistance to treatment and develop treatment strategies to increase anti-tumoural immune responses.
The research project is not yet completed. However, initial analyses on tumour samples (biopsy of the tumour or the metastases before and during the treatment) showed that patients with high infiltration of immune cells into their tumour (high immune scoring of the tumour) benefitted most from the immunotherapy treatment. Furthermore, the immune scoring of the tumour did not change over the course of the patient's treatment, suggesting that this biomarker could be used before treatment to select patients with the best chance of benefitting from immunotherapy. Further research on blood and extensive sequencing of tumour DNA is ongoing to confirm these results.
That same year, the Eurofins Foundation also provided a grant to a project researching the role of gut microbiota in the development of Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD). It is now widely accepted that the gut, and bacteria present in the gut lumen, constantly communicate with the brain. Food is a key element that influences the gut bacterial ecosystem, also known as the gut microbiota. This project aims to understand the role of the gut microbiota in the development of AUD, with the aim of helping AUD patients to improve the outcome of their disease through nutritional intervention (namely, increasing the intake of prebiotic fibres that are known to improve the composition of the gut microbiota). The study more specifically tests the effects of nutritional intervention on the biological, behavioural and brain parameters of alcohol addiction and on the rate of relapse after alcohol detoxification.
Given the importance of the biological analysis, biostatistics and writing aspect of this project, the grant partially financed a PhD position, supporting work on the vast amount of data collected thus far.
These projects contribute to the following United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal
