Search results

Hepatocellular carcinoma is the most common primary liver cancer. Unfortunately, this tumor still has a high mortality rate due to the lack of effective treatments for its most advanced or poorly localized forms. As part of a partnership with the CHU UCL Namur - site de Godinne and with the support of Roche Belgium, researchers in the Department of Biomedical Sciences are trying to understand why liver tumor cells are so resistant to treatment, and to identify therapeutic alternatives to better target them.

The Faculty of Medicine is equipped with several cross-disciplinary research entities that also rely on collaboration with UCL Godinne University Hospital within the Namur Institute for Life Sciences (Narilis) research institute..

This is a significant honor for two members of the UNamur School of Medicine: Professor Charlotte Beaudart, who heads the "clinical research" track of the Master’s program in biomedical sciences, and Professor Jonathan Douxfils (School of Medicine, URPC – NARILIS) have just joined the College of Young Researchers of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium.

After nine years at the helm, Professor Jean-Pierre Gillet has handed over the leadership of the Department of Biomedical Sciences to Professor Marielle Boonen. This is an opportunity to look back on the significant growth of this department, which now trains nearly 500 students each year. 

Extensive deliberations have been conducted to strengthen the fundamental research focus of the Master’s program in Biomedical Sciences at UNamur by integrating the curriculum from the Master’s program in Biochemistry and Molecular and Cellular Biology (BBMC). This ambitious project has led to the design of an entirely new program, conceived to fully leverage the complementary strengths of these two programs. 

As part of the English course of the Bachelor in Science and Medicine, students are introduced to the oral popularisation of scientific concepts. This year, these future biologists, chemists, geologists/geographers or pharmacists expressed themselves in the form of videos inspired by the famous French science popularisation programme, "C'est pas sorcier". A competition to choose the best video has been launched as part of the Printemps des sciences.

In late November, the Mont-Saint-Guibert-based company Cellistic® donated equipment it no longer used to UNamur. By enabling the university to give this equipment a second life, Cellistic is making an important gesture in support of the development of university research.

Since September 2023, Marc Hennequart, Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at UNamur, has been conducting groundbreaking research into pancreatic cancer. His team, based at the Faculty of Medicine and the Institut Narilis, studies the early stages of oncogenesis (the process of transforming a normal cell into a cancerous one) to better understand the metabolic changes behind this particularly aggressive cancer.

Beautiful victory for Margaux Mignolet, a researcher at the Faculty of Medicine's Unité de Recherche en Physiologie Moléculaire (URPhyM), who wins 1st prize in the Belgian inter-university final of the Ma thèse en 180 secondes (MT180) competition. Her research? To better understand the mechanisms of antibodies active in cases of long COVID. The second prize in this national competition was also won by a candidate from Namur. It was Petra Manja, from the Unité de Recherche en biologie des micro-organismes (URBM), Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, and is pursuing a thesis aimed at understanding resistance mechanisms in the bacterium E. coli. Both are also researchers at the NARILIS Institute.

The University of Namur participated in the recent Belgian state visit to Norway with the aim of strengthening collaboration between Belgian and Norwegian universities on major scientific and societal challenges. The UNamur delegation consisted of Rector Annick Castiaux, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine Jean-Michel Dogné, and Professor Benoît Muylkens (Department of Veterinary Medicine). 

On Saturday, April 18, 2026, Vice-Rector for Research Benoît Champagne and Professor Anne-Catherine Heuskin, a Télévie project sponsor, represented the UNamur community on the set of the Télévie gala. On this occasion, they presented a check for 20,000 euros to support this FRS-FNRS initiative, which raises funds to finance numerous research projects at universities in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, with one goal: to improve treatments for this disease, which now affects nearly 80,000 new patients and claims nearly 30,000 lives each year in Belgium.