EXPIRE group
The EXPIRE group consists of 30-35 researchers, including PhD students, analysts, postdocs and master/bachelor students. You will work closely with other analysts as well as doctors and nurses from the Pulmonology department. Within the Pulmonary Diseases department there is an extensive fundamental, patient-oriented line of research into the development, progression and treatment of lung diseases.
The research is embedded within the Groningen Research Institute of Asthma and COPD, a multidisciplinary and translational research institute. The analyst will play a central role in conducting biomedical research, with a focus on the lung disease COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). The research has a highly translational approach with the associated processing and analysis of patient-derived samples. The analyst collects the material from doctors in the operating room, processes and stores the samples, and is involved in the culture of cells from the patient. The analyst is also responsible for the administration and registration of all samples. As an analyst, you must be prepared to proactively participate in general laboratory management tasks, such as ISO regulatory matters, and to work closely with the clinic.
You will be involved in processing patient material, facilitating research and developing and implementing new technologies within a large, national consortium project: Precision Medicine for More Oxygen (P4O2). Patient material will come from a cohort of COPD and control subjects from the SHERLOCk project (An integrative genomic approach to Solve the puzzle of severe early-Onset COPD). As an analyst you are responsible for collecting, storing and managing all clinical samples collected within the COPD cohort, processing the samples for (single cell) RNA sequencing and proteomics analyses, isolating cells and culturing these cells in different models (air-liquid interface cultures, organoid mini-lungs). Furthermore, you will contribute to setting up a new in vitro airway-on-chip model to study the interaction of structural lung cells with the exposome (inhaled substances from the environment) in a 3D setting.