Pre Christine Sempoux

Christine Sempoux was recently appointed as Professor of Pathology and Médecin Cheffe in Clinical Pathology at the Institute of Pathology at the CHUV.

Her diagnostic activities are focused on digestive pathology.

She graduated as a MD at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium) in 1990, and obtained a PhD degree in Biomedical Sciences in 2002. The same year, she received the Alvarenga de Piauhy price from the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium for her work on the endocrine pancreas. She spent one year of observership at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Mount Sinai Medical School in New York City (NY, USA) to increase her pathologist’s experience in digestive oncology and hepatology. From 1998 to 2014, she was a senior member of the Pathology Department at the Cliniques universitaires Saint Luc (Catholic University of Louvain, Brussels, Belgium), and she became Professor in 2005.

She has authored more than 160 scientific publications. She is member of the Laennec Liver Pathology Society, the Hans Popper Hepatopathology Society and the European Society of Pathology.

• Malignant transformation of hepatocellular adenoma, primary liver carcinoma phenotypes
• Carcinogenesis of colorectal cancer and pancreatic cancer
• Response of digestive cancers to treatment
• Function of the endocrine pancreas in normal and pathologic conditions.

Her research work is oriented in three directions:

• endocrine pancreas
• colorectal cancer
• liver.

In endocrine pancreas, she studied congenital hyperinsulinism, a rare disease affecting mostly neonates. Her group showed that morphology helps not only in diagnosing the disease subtypes and, accordingly, in directing the therapeutic approach on frozen sections, but also in understanding its pathophysiology.

In colorectal cancer, she showed the existence of a particular subgroup of patients with a peculiar p53 expression, mostly correlated with microsatellites instability but not always. In addition, her clinical group assessed the pathological response and impact on survival of several original clinical trials and she leaded during several years a central pathology review for the national program for the quality of care of rectal cancer (PROCARE).

In liver, she is currently studying liver fibrosis in children after transplantation, intra-hepatic cholangiocarcinomas and other primary liver carcinomas phenotypes and, in close collaboration with other pathology teams worldwide, they try to understand and to define malignancy in hepatocellular adenoma.