I started as a postdoctoral researcher in Geneva three months ago, and this is already the sixth blog post I am putting online since I left the Netherlands. Surprisingly, none of my posts thus far described what I am doing here or what I am planning to do. Please do not get me wrong, I want to be 100% open about my research, yet I was advised not to do so, at least not until I get (positive) feedback on the three grant proposals I submitted in the past four weeks. Nonetheless, I believe that I can share some details regarding my current research interests, so please read further if you are interested.
In my very first blog post I described (in detail) why I was interested in joining the Hopfgartner group in Geneva. In short, this group holds unique expertise in various analytical techniques ranging from sophisticated screening methods for low molecular weight compounds (e.g. sugars, lipids, drugs, vitamins, pesticides) to high-throughput (‘very fast and easy’) techniques which can potentially be (and probably soon will be) used in hospital laboratories. At this stage of my career, I am very much interested in learning new techniques and skills as I want to become an all-round and well-skilled biomedical researcher who uses state-of-the-art techniques to unravel all kinds of biological and clinical mechanisms.
A common feature of the mechanisms I would like to unravel is their link to maintaining and regaining health. It is obviously not strange that I am focusing on health, since I started my pharmacy studies twelve years ago because I wanted to make people better (without touching them, by the way). In fact, this passion to make people better did not at all water down in the past decade. However, the desired way of contributing to people’s health did change in recent years, and this change may have even triggered me not to become a pharmacist when I finished my master’s studies five years ago.
The thing is, I soon realized that a lot of drugs (but certainly not all of them!!!) do not necessarily treat a medical condition but rather target its symptoms. Some examples:
- many drugs against high blood pressure make us pee a little more or decrease the resistance of our blood vessel walls by which the blood pressure drops;
- many drugs against arrhythmia slow down the electrical currents that make our heart beat and thereby restore a normal rhythm of the heart;
- many drugs against shortness of breath induce a relaxation of the airway wall muscles causing the airways to widen up by which breathing becomes easier;
- many painkillers suppress the perception of pain and thereby provide relief.
Such symptomatic treatments are important in present-day medical practice and will likely remain important in the future. I thus believe that research on this type of treatments should continue to receive high priority, but I also believe that we should do research on interventions that directly target the origin of a disease or even prevent certain diseases. Personally, I am very much interested in how we can prevent and treat diseases by means of lifestyle changes. We all heard about the dangers of unhealthy diets, inactivity, tobacco smoking, and alcohol use, but the power of lifestyle-based medicine has likely not yet reached its full potential. Fortunately for all of us, some researchers are currently carrying out lifestyle-related projects, so we will hopefully be hearing more from them soon. And with regard to me and my research ambitions, I am planning to focus on lifestyle-based medicine as well, so one day you might also be hearing from me on this subject.
analyzed-by-frank.com 