Erasmus MC

Now, we'll come back to your science in a minute, but I want to just go back and tell our listeners how you started into the field.

So you trained as a neurologist in Rome, and then you moved into human molecular genetics at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, where you are a professor.

So can you walk us through your journey and what drew you from clinical neurology into genetics? Yeah.

Yeah, I studied medicine and graduated in Rome, in Italy, and then also got my certification in clinical neurology there.

My touch is not very good.

And at Erasmus Medical Center.

And for the virus urology aficionados out there, Bernadette is Ron Fouchier's wife.

So it was only discovered in 2001, but it was likely circulating in humans for quite some time already.

And I'm very glad to have a specialist on my side, which is Juna de Vries.

She's a neurologist from the Netherlands at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, which, as many of you may know, the expertise center for autoimmune encephalitis in the Netherlands.

And Jonas, your focus is on care for autoimmune encephalitis patients and also for their caregivers, your training residents, and have a special interest in neuroimmunology and clinical research.

And I'm looking forward to a discussion on today's topic, which is translation and neuroimmunology targeted cellular therapy for NMBE receptor encephalitis.

So for me, when I talk to an international company and say, these are the benefits from being in the Netherlands, this is the opportunity, it actually sometimes is a little bit more believable than just a Dutch person saying it.

So it adds that extra bit of value because I'm from outside of the Netherlands, let's say.

And now you're working at Rotterdam Square, and that's an organization that sits at Erasmus MCA, that's a medical center in Rotterdam.

So what does the organization do?

Right, so yes, Rotterdam Square was set up three and a half years ago.

We're in routine clinical use in the National Guard Hospital in Saudi Arabia.

And we recently announced the test being implemented at Erasmus MC University Medical Center in the Netherlands, which is obviously a very prominent organization.

And in the US, obviously, the US is a key market for us.

And for both products, the submission route is slightly different.

And I think I would like to start maybe at your experience as a student.

So I know that you did a couple of research internships, for example, at Erasmus MC and also the AMC in Amsterdam, I think also in the Cardiff University before you started your PhD in Switzerland.

And this is really a big amount of internships to do was it intentional or were there just opportunities that came along

i always did what felt right for me at the moment but most of the time of course there was a reason behind it so the erasmus mc that was a lab that was doing research on aneurysm formation

so

at that time i was still a bachelor student on biomedical sciences and I wanted to do that specific internship to figure out do I want to do like a really a research master on cardiovascular disease specifically so and that kind of internship helped me to figure out you know I really like this I didn't like this way of doing an experiment trying to figure out a little piece of the puzzle and then putting them together I think this kind of opened it up for me And then my other two internships were really on cardiovascular specific diseases because they fit on my cardiovascular research master.