Research technician

We are looking for a highly motivated and hardworking research technician who will support and extend the research of our group in the field of erythropoiesis.

Research
Patients with chronic anemic diseases importantly depend on chronic transfusion regimes. Treatment of these patients with chronic blood transfusion however expose these patient to transfusion-related risks like allo-immunization, iron-overload and cardiac arrest. A major goal within transfusion research is therefore to reduce the intensity of chronic transfusion support, in order to decrease transfusion-related complications and improve quality of life.
Stimulation of erythropoiesis with erythroid stimulating agents (ESA’s) mostly results in a partial temporal response, frequently leading to treatment resistance. Development of novel therapies to increase erythropoiesis in these patients is hampered by poor understanding of the homeostatic erythroid response in bone marrow (BM) to anemia, known as stress erythropoiesis. The in vivo stress erythropoiesis is mainly studied in mice, where it occurs in a completely different organ and niche compared to human (spleen vs BM, respectively). Mouse models, therefore, do not reflect the molecular events occurring in humans (Zhang, Exp Hematol 78, 21). Thus, there is an urgent need to improve understanding of BM stress erythropoiesis in order to develop novel opportunities to treat anemia.
Our lab recently developed innovative techniques to study stress erythropoiesis, which will be used by the PhD students in our group to uncover the signaling mechanisms that underlie the control on stress erythropoiesis. We are currently looking for a technician to perform and extend this research in close collaboration with the PhD-students. The findings of this project may ultimately lead to the identification of molecular mechanisms which can be targeted to stimulate erythropoiesis, in order to decrease transfusion dependency of patients with chronic anemia.

Objectives
The main goal is to extend the development of new techniques in our group to define the underlying molecular signals which control cell behaviour of erythroid progenitor cells during proliferation and differentiation.