CV of Nicole van de Kar

It was the winter of 1990 when I and ‘my box’ arrived in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This box was filled with dry ice and sera from 45 patients with so called typical HUS. These sera were carefully sampled since 1974 and put in the refrigerator by my colleagues in pediatric nephrology who were convinced that one day the cause of this impressing illness would be found. So in 1990, five years after the famous publication of the paper of Dr Karmali and his colleagues in which they described the association of  STEC and typical HUS, and only year after the first STEC congress being held in Toronto,  my sera and I, just graduated from medical school, arrived in Toronto.

The aim was to investigate if STEC could also play a role in HUS in the Netherlands. My unforgettable stay in Toronto in the Department of Microbiology of the Hospital of Sick Kids joining the enthusiastic multidisciplinary research STEC team was the starting point of my PhD project investigating the role of Shiga like toxin in the pathogenesis of HUS. During my residency in Pediatrics and Pediatric Nephrology thereafter, I learnt the clinical impact of a STEC infection leading to HUS in children.

For more than 20 years now I am participating as clinician in the HUS research team in Nijmegen. Besides the translational research in HUS, STEC-HUS and non-STEC HUS, our laboratory performs the following diagnostics in HUS patients for the whole the Netherlands: DNA analysis for complement genes, antibodies against O157, antibodies against Factor H. Together with European colleagues pediatric nephrologists interested in HUS we founded the European Pediatric Research Group for HUS in 2000. 

1963
Born in Ubach over Worms, NL

1989
Graduation Medical School, Radboud University Nijmegen, NL

1994
PhD Thesis entitled Pathogenesis of Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome in Childhood, Pediatric Nephrology Department Radboud University Medical Center Nijmegen in collaboration with Dept Microbiology, Hospital of Sick Children, Toronto, Canada and TNO Gaubius Institute Leiden, the Netherlands

1994 – now    
HUS Research team Nijmegen, NL

1998 – now
Staff Pediatric Nephrology, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center, Nijmegen, NL

2000 – now
European Pediatric Research Group for HUS

2000 – now
Member International VTEC Steering Committee

2009 – now
President VTEC 2012 Amsterdam