Dr Carine de Beaufort and Dr Pascal Stammet of the the Centre Hospitalier de Luxembourg (CHL) received awards for their research on diabetes and cardiac arrest, which is supported by IBBL (Integrated BioBank of Luxembourg).
Last week, on the 29 April 2014, the Centre Hospitalier de Luxembourg (CHL) organised their annual Education & Research Day in the presence of Claude Meisch, Luxembourg’s Minister of Higher Education & Research. At the event the CHL’s management committee presented three awards for excellent scientific work, as voted for by the hospitals clinicians. IBBL collaborates on two of these studies and works closely with the clinicians that received these awards, Dr Carine de Beaufort and Dr Pascal Stammet. These awards honour the dedication, hard work and quality of research of Dr de Beaufort and Dr Stammet, their teams and affiliated institutes. But they also highlight the merits of large scale collaborative projects, be it in on a national or international scale. Indeed neither one of these studies would have been as successful without the joined effort of scientists and clinicians from several institutes.
For her work on the microbiome in a family study of diabetes mellitus, Dr de Beaufort, who is a consultant in paediatric endocrinology and diabetology, received the CHL Senior Science Award – Translational Research 2012/2013. The study was launched in 2012 as a collaboration between the CHL, IBBL (Integrated Biobank of Luxembourg), the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) and the Clinical and Epidemiological Investigation Center (CIEC) and has already made significant progress in the pilot phase. Families with diabetes have been recruited via the CHL and the CIEC and a wide range of biospecimen have been collected and processed at IBBL and the LCSB. By analysing the participant’s gastrointestinal microbial communities and their own genome, the researchers hope to determine if and how the microbiome is linked to dysfunctions associated with diabetes and discover potential disease modifiers.
The CHL Senior Science Award – Clinical Research 2012/2013 went to Dr Pascal Stammet, anaesthesiologist at the CHL, for his work as an investigator on the Targeted Temperature Management (TTM) trial, an international, multi-centre, randomized clinical trial. The first results from the study, published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (2013), suggest that therapeutic hypothermia, as recommended by international guidelines, for the treatment of cardiac arrests may not actually be beneficial for survival. The investigators found that hypothermia at a targeted temperature of 33°C did not confer a benefit as compared with a targeted temperature of 36°C. As patient recruitment is finished and the first phase of the trial is completed, the researchers are now continuing to analyse patient blood samples which have been stored at IBBL. In addition to the physical storage of samples, IBBL provided logistics services, including the preparation of collection kits, which were shipped to multiple hospitals all over Europe, and preformed RNA extractions from whole blood samples.
Photo (left to right): Dr Marc Schlesser, Dr Guy Berchem, Dr Carine de Beaufort, Dr Julien Wen Hsieh, Dr Pascal Stammet, Dr Catherine Boisanté, Dr Romain Nati. © CHL