Professor Dirk – Jan Slebos

Pulmonary Physician
University Medical Centre, Groningen, The Netherlands

Biography
Curiosity, innovation, and improving unmet needs are a few of my personal drives to perform research. As a pulmonary physician on a daily basis, it is very visible that life is very vulnerable, and “that every breath counts”. After having seen thousands of severe COPD patients for a wide variety of often still experimental interventional pulmonary treatments, it became obvious that we are only able to effectively treat a very small portion of this patient population. With an international alliance we have a greater opportunity to succeed in further developing new strategies, improve current practice and drive training & education.
My own research and research group is one of the key players in the world around the development of innovative, minimally invasive therapeutic interventional treatments for COPD (both bronchitis and emphysema). Bringing ideas in this exciting field from bench to bedside, and even getting them worldwide approved, used, and embedded in treatment guidelines is my key focus. More specific my
research deals with 1) invention and early adaption of medical devices for COPD, 2) advanced COPD imaging for precise phenotyping supporting new interventions, 3) as spin-off: innovative interventional pulmonology treatments for other lung diseases (mainly lung cancer and benign airway disease), and 4) translational research in COPD.
The outreach of our scientific clinical work has led to the implementation of new treatments for emphysema worldwide, such as the endobronchial valve- and coil treatments, which are currently guideline therapies. Creating therapies for a severe – and often untreatable – disease as COPD results in a lot of public awareness. Our work therefore often results in news items, television documentaries, and magazine articles worldwide. Being one of the key players in this field, I advise scientific medical groups, hospitals, and individual physicians on these new treatments, both as research opportunity, but also on an individual patient level in over 40 countries.