Jos van Pelt is associate professor at the laboratory of Hepatology of the KU Leuven. His research is on basic and translational aspects of liver diseases. The main theme is the translation of functional, molecular and protein changes to clinically related questions (oncology, NASH, liver transplantation, liver polycystosis).
He started in the late 1980’s with human hepatocyte isolation and their characterization as model for viral and parasitic disease. In recent years, in close collaboration with the department of digestive oncology (Prof Van Cutsem and Verslype) his group has been studying the transcriptional and epigenetic changes that the tumor microenvironment inflicts on gastrointestinal cells and how this affects the aggressiveness of a tumor. Although each cell type responds with a different set of genes, the underlying processes appear similar and offer a target for treatment.