Reint Jellema, pediatrician-neonatologist and researcher
“I’m mainly concerned with the consequences for the brain when babies have a rough start, whether they were born prematurely, were deprived of oxygen, or both. I’m looking for new therapies that limit the damage to the brain and I try to visualize the damage and repair it with MRI. If you can limit the damage, you prevent many problems later in life. This can subtly manifest itself in mild learning and attention disorders, which often only become apparent from school age. Then it turns out that the connections in the brain are suboptimal, which is understandable, because with premature birth, the final maturation of the brain has to happen outside the uterus, and that’s never optimal. In severe cases there is also a lack of oxygen around the birth and more severe motor and intellectual disabilities can arise. My research primarily revolves around the development of stem cell therapy that we hope to one day give to premature babies and other babies with bad starts. We’re actually on the verge of translating that method from the lab model to humans in the clinic. In the lab, we’ve seen that some stem cells limit damage to nerve cells in the brain, inhibit inflammation, and improve function. This is very promising. As a doctor, it is relatively easy to conduct research in Maastricht, as everything is close by. You literally cross the bridge to the university. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a unique environment where I can merge these two worlds. I’m not saying it’s always easy. Clinical work in the hospital is always unpredictable, patients come first and I also have a family with children. But it also makes me proud to be able to work in a multidisciplinary team of doctors, nurses and researchers who are among the best in the world in this field”.
