One of these grants has been awarded to Annemarthe van der Veen of our department, head of the Molecular Biology of Innate Immunity group, for her project ‘Inflammation without infection’.
If our immune system is no longer able to distinguish between the body's own molecules and microbial molecules such as viruses, this leads to autoinflammatory disorders. "An inflammatory reaction then takes place without there being an infection", explains Van der Veen, researcher at the Immunology department. "We are going to investigate the causes of such a sterile inflammation".