Peter Carmeliet

Peter Carmeliet (born December 8, 1959 in Leuven ) is a Belgian medic. He is a professor at the Catholic University of Leuven .

Life

Carmeliet graduated from Leuven in 1984 with a “maxima cum laude” medical doctorate, was a visiting scientist at the University of Maryland in 1978 and at the University of California, San Francisco in 1981 , and completed his clinical training in internal medicine at the University Hospital from 1984 to 1986 Löwen and received his doctorate in 1989 in Leuven (Ph. D.). In 1986 he was at the Marine Biological Laboratories in Woods Hole, 1989/90 at Harvard Medical School in Boston and from 1990 to 1992 at the Whitehead Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . In 1992 he returned to Leuven and founded his own research group. In 1994 he became a "Hoofdocent" and in 1998 a full professor from 2000.

He is director of the Angiogenesis and Neurovascular Link Laboratory and Cell Metabolism and Proliferation Laboratory at the Vesalius Research Center, of which he is director. He is also the adjunct director of the Center for Transgenic Technology and Gene Therapy of the VIB (Flemish Inter-University Institute for Biotechnology).

In 2002 he received the Francqui Prize , the Interbrew-Baillet Latour Health Prize in 2005 , the Ernst Jung Prize in 2010 and the Anitschkow Prize of the European Atherosclerosis Society in 2016 . For 2018 he was awarded the Léopold Griffuel Prize and the AH Heineken Prize for Medicine . He has been a member of the Leopoldina since 2010 , of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences since 2017 and of the Academia Europaea since 2019 .

Carmeliet has been married since 1987 and has three children.

plant

Carmeliet has been studying the molecular basis of angiogenesis , particularly VEGF (Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor) , since the 1980s . In the early 1990s, independently of Napoleone Ferrara , he succeeded in developing knockout mice that lacked one or both copies of the VEGF gene - serious malformations occurred in both cases. The experiments showed that VEGF was very important for the formation of blood vessels in embryos. They also showed that the blood vessels were the first organs the embryo formed.

VEGF (the gene of which was first cloned in 1989) also plays a role, particularly in the development of cancer, and has been intensively investigated since then (also with the development of antagonists and antibodies against VEGF, especially in cancer therapy). His laboratory also discovered a role for VEGF in the formation of ALS in the mouse model and developed a gene therapy for it (in the mouse model). That was the first indication of the importance of VEGF in neurodegenerative diseases.

In his laboratory, Carmeliet also examined other molecules with similar functions such as PlGF (placental growth factor), which also plays a role in angiogenesis, but only in cancer and inflammation (so that a blockage does not have an effect on normal blood vessel formation as with VEGF) . He and colleagues tested drugs that block PlGF.

He also investigates the way in which blood vessels, similar to nerve cells, find their way during regeneration and investigates the connections between the two phenomena.

Web links

• Homepage in Leuven
• interview

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Carmeliet et al. a. Abnormal blood vessel development and lethality in embryos lacking a single VEGF allele , Nature, Volume 380, 1996, pp. 435-439, in the same issue was also a paper by Ferrara and colleagues reporting similar results.