Rick van Leeuwen

Technical staff

Rick van Leeuwen is the senior technician/laboratory manager of the Department of Cardiology at Maastricht. He has more than 30 years of expertise as senior technician in different research labs at renowned research facilities in the Netherlands, of which 20 years at Maastricht UMC+.

An important general aspect of his work is to manage all the cardiology research laboratory facilities, control the financial status of the bench fee of the research projects and update lab permits for internal and external audits. He is also a member of the Groot Cardio Lab meetings.

My research aspect is more in the protein field, like unravelling protein-protein interactions in viral myocarditis with techniques like pull down assays and co-immunoprecipitation or to identify new protein targets by mass spectrometry. In order to understand the mechanism, I study in vitro, signal transduction pathways in isolated neonatal cardiomyocytes and fibroblasts by Western Blotting. Therefore, I use other primary cells (macrophages from bone marrow), isolation of adult mouse cardiomyocytes and multiple cell lines.

For micro-RNA research, I use Northern Blot techniques and to study mRNA targets or unknown microRNA I perform RNA-immunoprecipitation (RIP) assays with Argonaute-2 and RNA pull down assay. For establishing the targets, I use next gen RNA sequencing tools. Furthermore, I am introducing novel techniques/technologies to optimize our research interests and improve routine lab techniques with recent high-tech compounds.

For education purposes, I coach the pH-students intensively in their daily research aspects and trained science college students in genetics and molecular biology at Chemelot Campus.