Postdoc Pulmonology

Do you enjoy working with cell culture, and are you experienced with Organs-on-Chips models? Do you want to work on a project that focuses on studying the development and therapy of COVID-19 post-ARDS pulmonary fibrosis? Then this might be the perfect position for you!

Development of severe COVID-19 is associated with significant lung damage, where scar tissue formation (fibrosis) in lung tissue develops in a subset of patients. This occurs mostly in patients with a severe course of disease, who usually have to be ventilated at the intensive care. In addition to the virus infection, mechanical ventilation is potentially also a risk factor for fibrosis development, and this is where you come in! We aim to understand the long-term consequences of severe viral infections on lung tissue and the possible role of mechanical ventilation. Based on this new insight, the course of the disease can be better predicted and a (better) treatment can be developed.

The overall goal of this project is to develop a 'fibrosis lung-chip' culture model in which we simulate normal and mechanical ventilation-like breathing stresses, to understand how fibrosis develops. This model consists of human cells, providing an effective starting point for a better understanding of fibrosis, and treatment.

You will focus on the identification of key players in post-ARDS fibrosis development using Precision Cut Lung Slices and translate this to a representative model of this process in our Organ-on-Chip platform.

The PulmoScience lab of the Department of Pulmonology works with a variety of advanced cell cultures models including commercial Lung-Chips, which will form the foundation for development of these models.