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by Katja Wolthers, clinical virologist at Department Medical Microbiology, Amsterdam UMC/AMC. May 18. Only one positive patient in the late-night run, between over a hundred negative test results of the last days in our hospital laboratory. SARS-CoV2, causing Covid-19. It’s like my life as a clinical virologist suddenly became all about just one virus. Did I think I had seen it with the pandemic flu of 2009? Did I think the Ebola outbreak of 2014 was the worst I would ever see? Maybe it was, but SARS-CoV2 is the only virus I’ve seen so far with such an impact on...
Read moreby Amalia Dolga, University of Groningen, October 2019 A few years ago, while interviewing for a Rosalind Franklin Fellow position at the University of Groningen, I was asked a very intriguing question by a member of the interview committee: “how could microfluidics contribute to the field of neuroscience?” The questioner was Prof. Elizabeth Verpoorte, and her question gave me a clear picture of the integrative and collaborative research environment in Groningen. This became more concrete over the years that followed as the two of us, together with two Master students, started to build multicompartment microfluidics chambers to grow cells and...
Read moreErik Danen is Professor of Cancer Drug Target Discovery at the Division of Drug Discovery & Safety of the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR), Leiden University. What sort of research are you doing? “My research deals with cellular signaling mechanisms in normal and diseased cells and I have a long-standing interest in cell adhesion signaling. How is information from the environment sensed, integrated, and translated into a cellular response? What are the mechanisms controlling whether cells survive and grow or die, whether they move or stay in one place? How do cells respond to changes in their environment, including...
Read moreRegina Luttge is chair of the Neuro-Nanoscale Engineering group at TU/e’s Microsystems section and ICMS Institute of Complex Molecular Systems. (photo: ICMS) What sort of research are you doing? “My group works on methods for the temporal and spatial control of the cellular microenvironment by utilizing nano- and microfabrication. Finding appropriate technological control mechanisms is key to developing physiological and clinically relevant solutions for the prevention, relief and cure of human diseases. My research line also covers the general investigation and development of microsystems for medicine and biology. We make microsystems with integrated bio-inspired functionality mediated by down-scaling device features and adjusting material properties...
Read moreOrgan-on-Chip models for studying virus-host interactions by Barry Rockx, Department of Viroscience, Erasmus University Medical Center December 2018 Over the past few decades, newly emerging viruses have triggered international concern, raised scientific challenges, caused major human suffering and imposed enormous economic damage on an almost yearly basis. Due to the rapid developments in the field of next generation sequencing, more and more new viral sequences are detected in a variety of species every year. While the majority of these viruses will not impact human health, many of the newly emerged viruses that caused large outbreaks in humans in the past...
Read moreEye-on-Chip, an emerging theme in hDMT A true story by Andries van der Meer, University of Twente. September 2018 Earlier this year, I organized a workshop together with prof. Anneke den Hollander of the Radboudumc to discuss the challenges and opportunities for organ-on-chip technology to be used in studying, preventing and treating visual impairment and blindness. This ‘Eye-on-Chip Workshop’ was hosted by the DesignLab on the campus of the University of Twente, and was far from your typical scientific meeting. The program was not packed with back-to-back Powerpoint talks, and the participant list was not filled with scientists from a single...
Read moreJolanda van der Velden is chair of the Physiology department at the VUmc and co-director of Amsterdam Cardiovascular Sciences, the VUmc/AMC research institute. What sort of research are you doing? We focus on physiological research on heart muscle cell pathology and its translation to the clinic. The disease I am working on is Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy or HCM, a lethal genetic heart disease affecting about 60.000 people in the Netherlands. I applied for an NWO VICI grant three times, the last time I succeeded. And in the mean time I applied at ZonMw with the ENERGY trial proposal, which also got granted. The ENERGY trial is a phase...
Read morehDMT connects people to start new collaborations A true story continued (by Jaap den Toonder, TU/e) september 2017 The history A bright PhD student in the Microsystems group at TU/e, Hossein Eslami Amirabadi, was collaborating with the group of John Martens at Erasmus MC to develop a “cancer-on-chip” device. Hossein developed a new way of integrating a well-defined fibrous matrix structure in a microfluidic device, which enabled him to study the migration of cancer cells under well-defined conditions. In this way, he was able to study the invasive behavior of cancer cells depending on their environment as well as that of...
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