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Tuesday, December 11, 2018 at 10:40AM 
Congratulations to Steffie Junius, the first PhD student to win the Golden Pipette!
Dr Carly Whyte had to relucantly hand over the Golden Pipette to Steffie Junius, in recognition of her pioneering experiments on regulatory T cell fate-mapping.
This means the Golden Pipette will stay in Leuven for now, but the Babraham Team is building up to take back the pipette in 2019!
Wednesday, November 28, 2018 at 8:48PM Congratulations to Prof Susan Schlenner who secured FWO funding today for a four year project on regulatory T cells! FWO is highly competitive and it is very rare for an applicant to be successfully funded on their first independent application. A sign of future success!
Liston lab, women in science Thursday, August 2, 2018 at 8:28PM 
Congratulations to Dr Lagou, who successfully renewed her prestigious FWO Post-doctoral Fellowship award. Vasiliki will work on the genetic control of immune disorders in patients.
Friday, June 29, 2018 at 2:07PM 
Congratulations to Dr Brajic, who was successful in the prestigious (and highly competitive) FWO Post-doctoral Fellowship awards. Aleksandra will work on developing new tools to study the function of regulatory T cells in kidney disease.
Tuesday, May 15, 2018 at 10:52AM Dr Aleksandra Brajic just won the best poster award at the Center for Brain and Disease Research. Winning against such strong competition, and on a project that does not involve the brain, is a real achievement! Dr Brajic's work on the lncRNA Flatr and regulatory T cells will be published soon.
Liston lab, women in science Saturday, April 14, 2018 at 4:49PM Tuesday, February 6, 2018 at 12:12PM 
Lab retreat 2018: the baton is being passed on, as Dr Oliver Burton, 2017 winner of the Golden Pipette, presents the trophy to Dr Emanuela Pasciuto. Our prestigious prize for the best experiment was awarded for the generation of a transgenic mouse to study brain Tregs.
Friday, January 19, 2018 at 5:22PM Today Dr Josselyn Garcia-Perez successfully defended her PhD, and also published an outstanding first-author paper on the genetics of Multiple Sclerosis in Brain. A double congratulations to our newest alumni!
Saturday, December 23, 2017 at 11:19AM An interview between Dr Liesbeth Aerts and Dr Stephanie Humblet-Baron on her recent paper in JACI:
Can you summarize the significance of your findings in a few sentences for people outside your field?
Working in the field of primary immunodeficiency disorders, we described a new mouse model for severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), recapitulating the key clinical features of SCID patients suffering of both immunodeficiency and autoimmunity (leaky SCID). Importantly our model proposed a novel efficient therapeutic approach for this disease.
What made the paper particularly outstanding?
Due to the pre-clinical evidence of a drug efficiency to treat a rare disease, patient clinical trials can be directly proposed. This treatment is already approved for human use in arthritis, so it could be rapidly be repurposed for leaky SCID patients. In addition, our model is available for further pre-clinical assay, including gene therapy.
When did you realize you were on to something interesting?
When I started to work with this model I already knew which gene was mutated (Artemis). However when I saw the mice for the first time I could tell that they were developing the exact same symptoms that we see in the clinic. I knew that other mouse models working on this gene had never seen leaky SCID symptoms, so I knew we needed to explore in depth the model. The other key moment was after treating our mice with the drug (CTLA4-Ig) – it completely blocked disease, making this a very valuable project with new therapeutic opportunities for patients.
Did the technology available at the department make a difference?
The FACS core was the major technique used for investigation this project.
A huge amount of work and energy must have gone into the paper. How did you cope with stress and doubts?
Liesbeth this is a joker question!
The project went actually quite smoothly, the hard time I got during this project was rather adjusting myself with motherhood and life in science at the same time.
What are you personally most proud of?
This work can be seen as translational medicine, with direct therapeutic benefit for the patients. The ability for better understanding the mechanism of the disease was also valuable to me.
Can you share some advice for others?
Always envision your project as a story to write and tell. When you find a new result ask what would be the next question and continue to explore it further.
Monday, December 4, 2017 at 1:54PM These are the new bathrooms installed at the University of Leuven Biomedical Sciences campus.
I kinda feel like this would be a lot funnier if KUL didn't have a 500+ year history of gender inequality. This is not a big deal compared to the long-term gender inequality in hiring at the professorial level. On the other hand, it certainly doesn't help. Like, if you are not going to fix your sexist hiring practices, the least you can do is to not actively belittle women on the biomedical science campus.
women in science 