Sebastiaan J Vastert

Sebastiaan Vastert is a pediatric rheumatologist/immunologist and a translational researcher with a PhD on mechanisms of disease and therapy in severe Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA) in 2013. He heads the department of pediatric rheumatology & immunology since 2022. From 2017, he co-leads a translational research group within the Center for Translational Immunology (CTI) together with Jorg van Loosdregt, molecular biologist. The v Loosdregt-Vastert lab, currently consists of 7 PhD students, 1 post-docs and 2 technicians.The group truely believes in the added value of bringing together young motivated researchers with different backgrounds (i.e. fundamental, clinical, computational, etc.) when aiming to translate understanding of mechanisms of disease and therapy to clinical practice. The V Loosdregt-Vastert group addresses clinically unmet needs from basic understanding of immunological mechanisms of disease, to identifying therapeutical leads and strategies to finally testing these in clinical practice. Sebastiaan leads a Dutch national multicentre interventional trial in the ZonMW Rational Pharmacotherapy program, assessing the value of IL-18 as a biomarker, guiding tapering and stop of biological maintenance therapy in systemic JIA (ESTIS trial). Together with Utrecht colleague Joost Swart and Canadian colleagues Rae Yeung and Susa Benseler, Sebastiaan co-leads the Dutch-Canadian Cohort Study UCAN CAN DU, aiming to develop personalised therapy for juvenile arthritis.