Christine Breynaert, MD, PhD
Laboratory of Clinical Immunology
Christine Breynaert, MD, PhD, graduated medical school at the KU Leuven in 2007. During her medical training, she performed an internship in Gynaecology and Paediatrics in Nantes, France. Under the supervision of Prof. W. Peetermans, she started her specialist training in Internal Medicine in 2007. In October 2009, she partially interrupted her residency in Internal Medicine to start a Ph. D. training in a collaborative setting between the Laboratory of Clinical Immunology and the IBD research unit of the Translational Research Centre for Gastrointestinal Diseases under the guidance of Prof. Dr. G. Van Assche, Prof. Dr. J. Ceuppens and Prof. U. Himmelreich. She was recipient of a Ph. D. Fellowship of the Agency for Innovation by Science and Technology (IWT Flanders).
In 2014, she obtained her Ph. D. on Studies on inflammation and fibrosis in a model of chronic inflammatory colitis. During this research, she developed a model of chronic colitis with relapse and remission mimicking the human disease course of IBD, in order to study the pathogenesis of chronic inflammation and fibrosis. Furthermore, she pioneered in the development of MRI T2 relaxometry as a non-invasive imaging technique for inflammation and fibrosis, supported by a grant from the Broad Medical Research Foundation. In 2014, she finished her training and was board certificated for General Internal Medicine.
In 2015 she performed a clinical and research fellowship in Allergology and Clinical Immunology at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam under supervision of Prof. R. Gerth van Wijk and at the University Hospitals Leuven under supervision of Prof. J. Ceuppens. From 2016 on, she will hold a staff member position at the department of General Internal Medicine with specialisation in Allergology and Clinical Immunology. Currently, she is continuing her research about innate lymphoid cells in inflammatory bowel diseases and intestinal fibrosis, in a collaboration of the Laboratory of Clinical Immunology and the IBD research unit of the Translational Research Centre for Gastrointestinal Diseases.
