About us

Anton Roks is known for his pharmacological and experimental intervention studies in the field of vasomotor disturbances, hypertension, vascular hypertrophy and related phenotypes. He initially investigated the cardiovascular function of the peptide hormone angiotensin-(1-7). Since 2008 he started working on vascular aging, which has now become his main topic. His work has resulted in several patents for experimental interventions in age-related cardiovascular disease. Based on genetic modifications that induce a vascular-specific DNA damage response in mice, he has generated models to selectively study accelerated cardiovascular ageing. This offers opportunities to follow the vascular aging process without bias of confounding factors, such as atherosclerosis. The relation of non-atherosclerotic vascular aging to cardiac and renal ischemia (INOCA, HFpEF, acute kidney injury) is his main health problem-related interest. His pharmacological expertise mainly concerns the nitric oxide – cGMP signaling pathway and other vasodilator pathways, and he is building up a new research line exploring the effects of the DNA damage response and aging on function of perivascular adipose tissue and mitochondrial function. For translational studies he has access to human coronary artery of individuals of all possible ages up until 70 years, and he is developing a 3D in vitro model of human vascular aging. His expert techniques are organ bath and in vivo vasomotor function studies, stiffness measurement, blood pressure measurements (tail cuff and telemetry), hemodynamic measurement (echo and PV loop catheter), and renal function. He has collaborations with companies with whom he works on several experimental therapies against vascular aging. In addition, he is closely working together with the renowned Dept. of Epidemiology, thus having access to large databases with (epi)genetic, transcriptomic, metabol(om)ic, and cardiovascular trait information of human populations such as the Rotterdam Study population.

Dr. W. Matthijs Blankesteijn studied Biology and Chemistry at the KU Nijmegen (now Radboud University). He obtained his PhD from the same University on a dissertation entitled ‘Beta-adrenergic receptor function and regulation in hypertension’. He currently is associate professor of Pharmacology and principal investigator at the Cardiovascular Research Institute Maastricht, Maastricht University, the Netherlands. His main research focus is on signaling mechanisms controlling the remodeling of the heart in response to a pathological stimulus such as pressure overload or ischemia. In this context he discovered the role of WNT signaling in processes associated with cardiac remodeling such as fibrosis and angiogenesis. With his co-workers, he has developed a collection of peptide fragments of WNT to act as inhibitors of the signaling pathway. Studies from his group and others have shown that pharmacological inhibition of WNT signaling has a beneficial effect on infarct healing, resulting in smaller infarcts and a better preservation of cardiac function. The activation of cardiomyocyte regeneration in the border zone has recently been proposed as a potential underlying mechanism, which would be in line with the well-established role for WNT signaling in the control of stem cell differentiation. A better understanding of the mechanisms of cardiomyocyte regeneration and the development of interventions that can stimulate this process has the potential to change the therapy of cardiac diseases form the current treatment of symptoms (‘care’) towards actually addressing the underlying problem (‘cure’). Other projects that are currently running in his group are on the role of WNT signaling in vascular calcification and on WNT signaling in the crosstalk between oligodendrocytes and endothelial cells in a context of cerebral small vessel disease.

Ingrid Dijkgraaf studied Molecular Sciences with specialization in Organic Chemistry at Wageningen University. Subsequently, she was a junior investigator at both the Department of Medicinal Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Utrecht University and the Department of Nuclear Medicine at the Radboud University Medical Centre. After obtaining her PhD degree, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Nuclear Medicine at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. After a subsequent postdoctoral position at the Radboud University Medical Centre, she started at the Department of Biochemistry of Maastricht University where she is currently working as an associate professor. In 2014 she was a Fulbright Scholar at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, USA. Her research focusses on the design and synthesis of peptides and proteins that can be used for molecular imaging, drug development, and studying molecular mechanisms in the field of cardiovascular diseases and oncology. Therefore, structure-activity relationship studies of polypeptides are performed. For her research, she peeks at Nature, especially at hematophagous parasites, as they express a vast variety of anticoagulant, anti-inflammatory, immuno-modulatory, and vasodilating proteins that evade or counteract host defence mechanisms. Therefore, these organisms represent major sources of lead compounds for development of pharmacological tools and potentially useful therapeutic agents.

Dr. Manoe Janssen focusses on understanding pathways that can be pharmacologically triggered to enhance the repair and regeneration of the kidney. She focusses on genetic factors and gene mutations that affect proximal tubule function and the development of human in vitro cell models for drug screening.  She makes use of the unique, patented, human renal cell lines from the Masereeuw group who have a high predictive value for drug and waste product transport and metabolism. She compares cells from heathy controls and patients to understand which pathways in the cell are affected, to search for druggable targets and evaluate phenotypic improvements. As part of an international consortium on the genetic kidney disease cystinosis she is testing different drug compounds as well as CRISPR/Cas9 mediated gene repair to find a new therapy for this disease.

Dr Ard Teisman works at the Global Safety Pharmacology, NCS, Janssen Research & Development, A Division of Janssen Pharmaceutica NV.

Dr Ard C.H. Teisman obtained a “Masters” degree in Biology (1992) at the University of Groningen (NL) with majors in CNS research (on effects of Social Stress on Epilepsy Kindling and Microdialysis Monitoring of the Food-Intake Activated Brain). After finishing his Biology degree he support a PhD project on Asthma research for one year, as an interim junior researcher (faculty of Pharmacy, RUG). Subsequently, he obtained a PhD position in Clinical Pharmacology (grad. 1998), exploring potential new therapies for the treatment of Heart Failure, followed by a brief Postdoc on cardio-renal pharmacology (Medical faculty, RUG). Then in 2001, Ard joined, Global Safety Pharmacology
Research at Janssen Pharmaceutica (in Beerse, Belgium), where his knowledge on the vital organs heart, brain and lungs could grow further. Within this team & discipline he fulfilled roles of increasing responsibility, supporting Drug Discovery & Development projects across Janssen R&D. Thereby, he helped guiding scientists in their decision process of selecting the safest compounds move forward (integrating and analyzing potential liabilities from in silico, in vitro and in vivo data). He helps generating safety related study designs, analysis and interpretation of study data, running basic research projects, performing due diligence assessments, preclinical to clinical translational
exercises etc. Currently, he is (co)author of more than forty international publications and numerous internal study reports. He was actively involved in a data analysis automation and helped developing a company memory / data-warehouse on the diverse Safety Pharmacology study data. Finally, he gives lectures on safety pharmacology and 3R-activities (both internally but also to scholars and students) and is a long lasting member of the Beerse, Ethics Committee for Animal Research (starting 2008, chair 2011).