Rudy van Coster

Professor Van Coster is division head of the Department of Pediatric Neurology and Metabolism, director of the Neuromuscular Reference Centre and for almost twenty years he has been head of the Mitochondrial Investigations Laboratory at thre Universite Catholique de Louvain. He is an expert in pediatric neurological disorders with main focus on the mitochondrial neuromyopathies.

The laboratory he is leading, is the only one in Belgium that offers both routine diagnostics on mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) defects and further scientific work-up of patients in whom such a defect has been detected.

Further more, the lab has developed a specific diagnostic strategy which simplifies the search for the underlying molecular defect in these disorders. Besides the classical spectrophoto-metry also Blue Native Polyacrylamide (BN-PAGE) combined with activity staining in the gel and different immunological techniques are used.

The combined use of all these techniques allows the identification of the patholological mechanism in these disorders and finally provide crucial information to locate the underlying gene defect.