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BRUSSELS 03/03/2026 - An international team of scientists, led by researchers from the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and UZ Brussel, has made a major breakthrough in the study of how our bodies maintain healthy blood sugar levels. In a new study, they show that young beta cells, the tiny factories in the pancreas that produce insulin, need an enormous amount of iron to become mature and functional.

How can we better understand and measure the quality of life of children living with life-limiting or life-saving conditions? While research on this topic exists, it too often excludes the very individuals most affected: the children themselves, a group frequently considered "too vulnerable" to participate ( Namisango et al.

New research reveals that, in space, certain heart muscles are put to the test by weightlessness. In just a few months, they atrophy. The consequences of this process, which takes decades on Earth, on astronauts' health remain to be assessed. On a positive note, these results could advance our understanding of certain mechanisms behind mitral valve insufficiency.

For many people, cancer treatment still means surgery, chemotherapy, or radiotherapy. But today, for a growing number of patients, treatment can involve something very different: their own immune cells.

Long COVID remains a complex and often invisible condition. Patients experience symptoms such as extreme fatigue, exercise intolerance, shortness of breath, cognitive impairment, and a pervasive sense of exhaustion for months or even years after a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Because these symptoms are not always objectively detectable through conventional medical tests, patients are frequently told that "everything looks normal", even though their daily lives remain severely restricted.

An international research team led by Arne Van der Vreken, Eline Menu, and Karine Breckpot (Translational Oncology Research Center, VUB) has made an important discovery that may advance the fight against multiple myeloma, also known as Kahler's disease.

As language models learn to interpret words in a sentence, protein Language Models learn how amino acids work together within a protein Konstantina Tzavella, who used artificial intelligence in her r

Teeth, important in everyday life, whether for eating or even smiling, and which we think we know, in reality remain a real mystery to science. Their living part - the pulp - is enclosed within a hard, opaque enamel envelope, making them difficult to observe. For the first time, a research team led by prof. Nicolas Baeyens and Dr Hoang Thaï Ha of the Physiology and Pharmacology Laboratory has developed a technique that makes teeth transparent, enabling them to follow in detail how a cavity forms and evolves within the tooth itself.

Researchers at the ULB Center for Diabetes Research, in collaboration with Oxford University and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, have mapped for the first time the effects of over 400 diabetes-related genetic variants on human pancreas cells. Their findings, published in Cell Genomics, open up new avenues for the development of personalized treatments.

How do treatments and socio-economic conditions affect the long-term survival chances of women with breast cancer? That is one of the central questions in the doctoral research of Eva Kimpe, affiliated with the Interuniversity Centre for Health Economics Research (I-CHER) and the Research Centre for Digital Medicine (Vrije Universiteit Brussel).

A team led by Miriam Cnop (Faculty of Medicine, ULB Center for Diabetes Research and Erasmus Hospital) has just discovered a new type of diabetes in infants, linked to mutations in the TMEM167A gene. Published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, this work carried out with the University of Exeter and international partners opens up new avenues for understanding the development of diabetes.

Thanks to a close collaboration between Carine Van Lint's laboratory (ULB), ULiège and UNamur, researchers have published their work in the international scientific journal PLOS Pathogens, focusing on a particular type of molecule produced by viruses - circular RNAs - and presenting an innovative bioinformatics tool capable of better identifying them.

What if there was a way to make ageing brain cells younger again? Researchers from Luxembourg and Spain recently set out to address this question. After developing an ageing clock capable of assessing the biological age of the brain, they used it to identify possible brain-rejuvenating interventions.

In a study published in Nature , biologists from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Princeton and Rockefeller University reveal the molecular instructions that enable the cell to construct the nucleolus, the organelle essential for protein production. Better still, they have succeeded in manipulating this blueprint to produce, on demand, artificial nucleoli with modulated properties.

Researchers at ULB's Laboratoire d'épidémiologie Spatiale are analyzing virus genomes to understand how the environment influences their propagation dynamics How do environmental factors, such as climatic conditions or land use, impact the speed at which a virus spreads through infected populations? A team from ULB's Laboratoire d'épidémiologie Spatiale has developed genetic analysis methods to measure this influence.

"Thinking you can leave everything to technology without investing in it yourself is a dangerous illusion." Can artificial delegates - that is, autonomous agents who make decisions on our behalf - help us achieve better outcomes in situations where collective failure lurks, such as when deciding on climate change or when swift action is called for in pandemics? A new behavioral experiment led by Professor Tom Lenaerts (VUB/ULB) sheds light on that question.

COPD, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, is a long-term condition in which the airways become narrowed, usually due to smoking or exposure to harmful substances. This results in symptoms such as shortness of breath, chronic coughing, mucus production, and fatigue. COPD often includes both chronic bronchitis and pulmonary emphysema.

VUB Researcher Develops Fluorescence Lifetime Endoscopy Imaging system with a Time-gated Camera to Visualise Inner Organ of Body Pooria Iranian, a doctoral researcher at the ETRO research group at th

A study by researchers at the Interuniversity Institute of Bioinformatics in Brussels, the Structural Biology research group at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and IBiTech-BioMMedA Group of Ghent University reveals how a key blood protein involved in inflammation and cancer -alpha-1-acid glycoprotein (AGP)-behaves in complex and surprising ways.

An international research team led by Professor Kiavash Movahedi from the Brussels Center for Immunology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel has published groundbreaking results today in the prestigious journal Immunity . Their study sheds new light on the possibility of effectively replacing defective microglia-the brain's immune cells-marking a potential breakthrough in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.