Ewoud van Velzen

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email

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C2.105

+31 20 525 6546

Introduction

Ewoud van Velzen studied Analytical Chemistry at the Hogeschool IJsselland in Deventer, where he received his BSc. degree in 1994. During the final year of his study he did his internship and research project at Twente University Enschede were he developed a NMR based method for determining the dynamic properties of large organic molecules in solution. After having obtained his bachelor degree, he continued working at Twente University for another year within the Analytical Science group. During this year he developed several GC-MS based methods for the analysis of aged and degraded oil in the soil. In 1995 he decided to start working a programmer at Cap Gemini and the ING/Postank in Amsterdam. However, after one year, he accepted a research position at the Unilever Research and Development facility in Vlaardingen. From 1996 to 2006 he gained experienced in several (spectroscopic) disciplines like atomic absorption spectroscopy, optical- and infrared spectroscopy and NMR spectroscopy. From 2003 he is also involved in several Metabolomic based projects. In 2005 Unilever decided to explore the Metabolomic field more extensively, which resulted in a new cooperation with the BDA group of prof. dr. A.K. Smilde. As a result, Ewoud got the opportunity to (partially) combine his work in Vlaardingen with a PhD project in Amsterdam. In november 2006 he started his PhD-project on Optimizing the information yield of designed metabolomic data from human intervention studies.

PhD Project

Environmental xenobiotic compounds in foodstuffs represent a significant source of both positive and negative influence on the health and function of the human body. Polyphenol mixtures represent one such class, and within a much wider realm of application, there is now substantial evidence to support the hypothesis that these may be beneficial in reducing cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk. Both the World Health Organisation and EU are urging the food industry to take action over the current and predicted increase in CVD rates – and polyphenols represent a most promising set of functional food ingredients for managing this increased risk. One issue that remains to be comprehensively resolved is that of polyphenol bioavailability. It is now well accepted that the majority of polyphenol compounds persist to the colon intact where they undergo extensive metabolism by the resident gut microbiota (microbiome) prior to absorption. This is a key step in understanding the fate of many xenobiotic compounds and their final clinical effects and yet this process has remained almost completely unexplored.

An important point is that compositional variations of the gut microbiota exist between individuals and this means that it is hard to predict health outcomes of polyphenol interventions. Resulting secondary metabolites from gut microbiota fermentation may have enhanced biological properties or maybe no activity at all meaning that certain individuals benefit much more optimally from polyphenol interventions in terms of CVD risk reduction. The complexity of the systems involved - polyphenol compositions in foods, gut microbiota and human metabonomes, make selecting specific targets for investigation using hypothesis-based approaches ineffective. The alternative approach to this is therefore to apply global measurement technologies in combination with novel pattern recognition techniques to all three systems to identify such targets. Integrating such disparate information in a Systems Biology approach will lead to workable testable hypotheses and the development of fundamental understanding of these complex systems. This is the key approach of GUTSYSTEM and will provide previously unobtainable information on polyphenol bioavailability. The final output of this application will be to provide a necessary understanding of how polyphenols affect CVD risk in humans.

Objectives