Moons Lab

Lieve Moons obtained her PhD in Science at KU Leuven, Belgium in 1990 and worked as a postdoctoral fellow from 1990 to 1994. She became a group leader (1995-2007) in the Vesalius Research Center (Flemish Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology - VIB), where she contributed to an extensive research program in vascular and neural development and cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disorders. In 2008, she became full professor at the Biology Department of KU Leuven, and head of the Neural Circuit Development and Regeneration (NCDR) research group, which has a strong interest in defining cellular/molecular mechanisms underlying neurodegeneration, neuroinflammation and regeneration in the injured, diseased or aged central nervous system (CNS) (https://bio.kuleuven.be/df/lm). Based on the emerging belief that the eye-brain pathway is a powerful model organ for CNS research, her team implemented several models for neurodegenerative and inflammatory eye diseases, and established injury paradigms in the optic nerve of both rodents and teleost fish, that allow studying neuronal and axonal regeneration, including (re)myelination, in the CNS. They follow a multidisciplinary approach in which advanced in vivo ocular imaging, electrophysiology and visual acuity testing in laboratory animals are being combined with detailed morphological phenotyping, using confocal/multiphoton/light-sheet microscopy, optical clearing and time-lapse imaging, and longitudinal and post-mortem morphometrical analyses to follow inflammatory and de/regenerative processes. Besides, ex vivo/in vitro retinal tissue/cell cultures, state-of-the-art opto- & chemogenetic, cell sorting and (single-cell) omics approaches are available to further study the (sub)cellular mechanisms and identify the molecular pathways underlying neuroprotection and regeneration. Their work fostered fruitful collaborations with industrial partners, developing new therapeutic compounds for ocular diseases, e.g. Oxurion NV, and enabled the founding of the ‘Vision Core Leuven’, a preclinical research platform with state-of-the-art technology to study ocular pathologies (http://www.visioncore.be) and the KillAge consortium, a killifish platform with research pipelines for biomarker validation and drug discovery in the field of aging, neurodegeneration, and stem cell biology.