Award winners - AZ Foundation & FWO/F.R.S.-FNRS

“We demonstrated that the earlier use of local therapy improved time to progression while preserving quality of life.”

The jury has decided in favour of Prof. dr. Piet Ost, Head of clinic of the Radiation Oncology department at Ghent University Hospital. He is also the Vice-Chairman of the EAU Young Academic Urologists Prostate Cancer Working Party and an active member of the Multidisciplinary Meeting on Urology and Skin Cancer at UZ Gent.

Prof. dr. Piet Ost received the AstraZeneca Foundation Award 2018 in Oncology for his promising approach of using local therapies earlier when treating prostate cancer. Prof. dr. Piet Ost first tried to improve the diagnostic tools to detect metastases by evaluating the role of novel PET-CT tracers, which resulted in an earlier and more accurate detection of metastases. In a next phase, the laureate optimized both surgical and radiotherapeutic techniques to optimally treat metastases with minimal side-effects. These techniques were then evaluated in a randomized trial that demonstrated that local therapy improved time to progression while preserving quality of life.

“It has been proven that MeST successfully reduces rAMS and can in some instances have a positive and significant impact on the severity of the symptomatology of both depression and PTSD.”

Prof. dr. Filip Raes is rewarded the Mental Disorders Award for developing a new approach to train people with mental disorders to retrieve specific memories. Research, including the work of Prof. dr. Filip Raes and his co-workers, revealed that depressed people have more difficulty retrieving specific memories from their autobiographical memory than non-depressed controls. Prof. dr. Filip Raes and his team have focused on the mechanism of 'reduced Autobiographical Memory Specificity' (rAMS) by developing a new approach that attempts to address this issue: people learn to recover memories in a more specific form through a training module called 'Memory Specificity Training' (MeST). Prof. dr. Filip Raes is professor of Clinical Psychology at KU Leuven and is a member of the Disciplinary Board of the Belgian Committee of Psychologists. Prof. dr. Filip Raes is also an editor for several magazines, including Mindfulness and the Journal of Experimental Psychopathology.

“We have discovered the existence of two populations of lung immune cells that are crucial for lung homeostasis.”

The jury decided to grant the AstraZeneca Foundation Award 2018 for Respiratory Diseases to Dr. Thomas Marichal for his research on lung homeostasis and bronchial asthma.

Dr. Thomas Marichal's work, which has been led together with Professor Fabrice Bureau, investigates the immune mechanisms underlying, on the one hand, pulmonary homeostasis and, on the other hand, the development of bronchial asthma. Their team of researchers has discovered the existence of two populations of lung immune cells that are crucial for homeostasis, i.e. lung interstitial macrophages and regulatory eosinophils. Indeed, these cells, in healthy individuals, can block the activation of dendritic cells, which are responsible for triggering the asthmatic reaction. In addition, upon exposure to environmental factors that promote asthma, such as respiratory viral infections or a "hygienic" environment, researchers have identified specific DNA filament-containing structures in the lung that robustly boost these dendritic cells and therefore favour asthma development.

Dr. Thomas Marichal works at the F.R.S.-FNRS and has already received numerous awards for his research. He is also a member of several scientific societies, including the Belgian Immunological Society and the European Respiratory Society.