Eckart De Bie

Medicine

Eckart De Bie (he/him), studied Medicine at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, graduating with honours for both the preclinical BSc(Hons) and clinical MD degree. During an internship in a molecular biological laboratory at IRCCS Ospedale San Raffaele in Milan, Italy, his interest was sparked in translating results from the ‘laboratory bench to the bedside’. This experience led him to pursue an MPhil in Translational Biomedical Research at the University of Cambridge. Eckart is currently a Gates-Cambridge funded PhD student with Dr Mark Toshner and Dr Chris Wallace at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Medicine (VPD Heart & Lung Research Institute). Eckart is delighted to join the CSAR community.

His research focuses on Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), a rare disease causing high blood pressure in the lungs, leading to heart failure and early death. The cause is unknown for most patients. PAH likely involves distinct disease mechanisms in different patients, yet current treatments don't distinguish between them. Using computational techniques, including machine learning, his research identifies subgroups of PAH patients based on markers of inflammation in their blood, enabling more accurate survival predictions and tailored treatments. For example, his research identified that C-Reactive Protein, a marker of inflammation available at GP practices, can be used to identify patient subgroups with different long-term outcomes. Moreover, he contributed to the development of a blood test to distinguish PAH from a rare subtype, called pulmonary veno-occlusive disease, for which traditional treatments of PAH might result in life-threatening complications and which requires lung transplantation.