Joke de Boer

Prof.dr. Joke de Boer is an ophthalmologist and acknowledged expert in inflammatory eye diseases with a special interest in noninfectious and infectious uveitis in adults and children. Noninfectious uveitis is a vision-threatening chronic, progressive inflammation of the interior eye. Current treatment strategies with immunosuppressive medications may fail to prevent the decline in visual function. Her research focusses on the underlying pathogenesis of noninfectious uveitis and development of new treatment strategies for this blinding disease in collaboration with the Laboratory of Translational Immunology. To this end, she uses the ‘Systems Medicine’ approach that combines in-depth phenotyping of the peripheral immune-compartment of patients and computational modeling of the derived high-throughput data to reveal the true perpetrating epigenetic mechanisms that drive noninfectious uveitis. The nature of this approach makes it very well suited for identifying novel biomarkers to improve treatment and disease outcome in patients with noninfectious uveitis in the near future. Other research topics are aqueous humor analysis in infectious uveitis in collaboration with the virology section of the department of medical microbiology .  Joke de Boer is member of the International Uveitis Study Group, the national guideline committee for uveitis and the European guideline committee for uveitis associated with juvenile idiopathic arthritis.