Diets and the gut microbiome: an energy-balance perspective/Molecular imaging of infections: towards pathogen-specific imaging

In the last decades, imaging and molecular imaging in particular has made tremendous progress and is now established as a staple of daily clinical practice. When it comes to inflammation and infections however, the vast majority of the imaging solutions in use today rely on either imaging of the host response, or look at non-specific microbe behaviour, insufficient to establish a specific diagnosis and to steer therapeutic choice.

Through the example of aspergillosis, a life-threatening fungal lung infection of immunocompromised patients, we will look at how our work on antibody-based PET imaging approaches (“immunoPET”) can provide quantitative, non-invasive and pathogen-specific imaging of infections with recently demonstrated high clinical translation potential. We will also discuss how click mediated radiolabelling of bacteria could lead to a novel understanding of the pathophysiology of salmonellosis, and the opportunities presented by such techniques for the study of host – commensals – pathogens interactions.