Career Timeline

Research Directions

The LMTC's research orbits around a central ambition: designing smart drugs that act precisely where and when they are needed. Our work integrates synthetic chemistry, computational modeling, and translational biology to bring novel therapeutic concepts to life.

Awards & Honours

Grants & Fellowships

Teaching

Publications

Invited Talks & Conferences

Chemical Synthesis Infrastructure

Our synthetic chemistry laboratory is fully equipped for both standard and advanced organic and inorganic synthesis, including air-free and anhydrous conditions essential for sensitive organometallic and medicinal chemistry work.

Air-Free Chemistry

Schlenk Lines & High-Vacuum Pumps

Dual manifold Schlenk lines connected to high-vacuum pumps enable rigorous exclusion of air and moisture — essential for the synthesis of sensitive organometallic complexes and reactive intermediates.

Purification

Biotage Flash Chromatography

Automated flash purification system for rapid isolation of synthetic compounds. Compatible with normal and reversed-phase cartridges, enabling efficient purification from milligram to gram scale.

Automated Synthesis

Mettler-Toledo EasyMax Reactor

Automated synthesis workstation with precise temperature control and real-time monitoring of reaction parameters. Ideal for reaction optimization and reproducible scale-up of key synthetic steps.

Stimuli-Responsive Chemistry

Ultrasound Irradiator

Probe sonicator for sonochemistry and mechanochemical reactions. Used in the synthesis and characterisation of novel drug candidates within our prodrug programme.

Chromatography

Shimadzu Semi-Prep HPLC + Agilent HPLC

Shimadzu semi-preparative LC system with fraction collector for isolation of complex mixtures and final drug candidates, complemented by an Agilent analytical HPLC for purity assessment and method development.

Evaporation

Rotary Evaporators (×2)

Two rotary evaporators for solvent removal under reduced pressure — standard workhorses of synthetic chemistry, enabling efficient workup and concentration of reaction mixtures and chromatography fractions.

Biology Infrastructure

A fully equipped cell and molecular biology suite enables the LMTC to evaluate synthesized compounds in relevant biological models — from cellular assays to immunological readouts.

Tissue Culture

Dedicated Cell Culture Room

Fully equipped BSL-2 tissue and cell culture room with laminar flow hoods and CO₂ incubators. Used for culturing cancer cell lines, primary cells, and patient-derived tumor models.

Molecular Biology Suite

Full complement of molecular biology equipment including PCR thermocyclers (qPCR and end-point), gel electrophoresis, Western blot systems, and ELISA readers for gene expression and protein quantification.

Immunophenotyping

Beckman Coulter Gallios Flow Cytometer

10-color flow cytometer for high-throughput immunophenotyping, apoptosis assays, cell cycle analysis, and characterization of immune infiltrates in tumor models.

Fluorescence Microscopy

Zeiss Axio AX10 Microscope

Upright fluorescence microscope for immunofluorescence imaging of cell lines and tumor sections — visualization of immune infiltrates, subcellular localization, and assessment of cell death markers.

Agilent 96-Well Plate Reader

Multi-mode plate reader with bioluminescence and UV-Vis detection. Used for cytotoxicity assays (MTT, resazurin), luciferase-based IRF3 reporter assays for STING pathway activation, and absorbance-based compound quantification.

HPC Computing Clusters

Theoretical and computational chemistry is a cornerstone of the LMTC. Through the CÉCI consortium (Consortium des Équipements de Calcul Intensif), we access five high-performance computing clusters across Belgian universities, totalling thousands of CPU and GPU cores for quantum chemical calculations, molecular dynamics, and large-scale cheminformatics.

Lyra

ULB · 1280 cores + 40× NVidia RTX 6000 GPU

Hyperconverged HPC infrastructure optimized for ML/AI and GPU-accelerated computing. Our home cluster at ULB.

Hercules 2

UNamur · 1024 cores + GPUs

Shared-memory and resource-intensive sequential jobs. Large RAM fat nodes (up to 2 TB) ideal for memory-demanding QM calculations.

Lemaître 4

UCLouvain · 5120 cores · 320 TB

High-throughput MPI parallel jobs on AMD EPYC Genoa CPUs. Excellent for large-scale ORCA/Gaussian DFT runs.

NIC 5

ULiège · 4672 cores · 520 TB

Massively parallel MPI cluster on HDR Infiniband. Fat nodes up to 1 TB RAM available for demanding correlated methods (MP2, DLPNO).

Dragon 2

UMons · 592 cores + V100 GPUs

Long-running jobs (up to 21 days) with NVidia Tesla V100 GPUs. Ideal for extended molecular dynamics simulations and neural network potentials.

Core Facilities

Beyond our in-house infrastructure, we regularly access world-class core facilities at ULB and partner institutions for specialized analyses.

ULB · NMR Spectroscopy

CIREM — Centre d'Instrumentation en REsonance Magnétique

The LMTC is a heavy user of ULB's NMR core facility, which houses four high-field spectrometers — two JEOL JNM-ECZ systems (400 and 600 MHz) at the Plaine campus, and Bruker and Varian instruments (300 and 400 MHz) at Solbosch. Prof. Berger sits on the CIREM directing committee, reflecting our deep engagement with this facility. Routine ¹H, ¹³C, DEPT, COSY, HSQC, HMBC, NOESY and variable-temperature experiments are performed here for full structural characterization of novel molecules, including complex multinuclear experiments on our metal complexes.

VUB / ULB · Genomics

BRIGHTcore — Genomics Core Facility

We access the BRIGHTcore sequencing facility (VUB/ULB) for transcriptomic and genomic analyses — including RNA-seq for immune gene expression profiling, whole genome sequencing, single-cell sequencing, and NGS-based validation in the context of our cancer immunotherapy studies. BRIGHTcore operates a comprehensive instrument fleet including MGI DNBSEQ-T7, Illumina NovaSeq 6000, MiSeq, and NanoPore long-read sequencers, providing high-quality, rapid-turnaround sequencing that complements our in-house molecular biology capabilities.

ULB · Mass Spectrometry

G-Time Laboratory — Quadrupole ICP-MS

We access G-Time's Agilent 7700 quadrupole ICP-MS for elemental and trace metal analysis — directly relevant for characterization of our metal-based anticancer complexes (platinum, gold, ruthenium, osmium) and quantification of metal uptake in biological samples. G-Time operates class-100 and class-1000 clean laboratories and offers dissolution by acid digestion or alkaline fusion, enabling precise multi-element quantification down to trace concentrations.

NMR Resources

Organic Synthesis Resources

Medicinal Chemistry Resources

Pharmacology & Medications

Spectral Databases

Computational Chemistry

Literature & Publishers

Educational Resources

Lab & Funding