Category Archives: News

Contribute to the Tumor Lymph Node-on-Chip End Users Questionnaire!

‘Tumor and Lymph Node-on-Chip for cancer studies’ (Tumor-LN-oC) is a Horizon 2020 EU project coordinated by the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) of the National Technical University of Athens and led by Professor Ioanna Zergioti who is the Principal Investigator. The consortium comprises 11 partners from the Industry and the Academia from 9 different EU countries. Researchers from hDMT are involved in this project as project partner or members of the Scientific Advisory Board. Tumor-LN-oC aims to offer a comprehensive solution for a robust, automated tumor-lymph node-on-chip platform that will connect primary surgically removed human tumors and LN...

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Organ-on-Chip technology at ‘Leiden City of Science’ public event

Young hDMT scientists will present the importance of Organ-on-Chip technology for science and society during a public event in Leiden on 28 May 2022. This event is organized by the NWA route Regenerative Medicine in the context of ‘Leiden as European City of Science’ this year. The public event is the start of the Life Sciences and Health week with many activities in the field of public health and drug development. More information here

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Open technology platforms for emerging medical domains

Last November the Health.E lighthouse released two white papers on open technology platforms for emerging medical domains with Organ-on-Chip of course being one of them. In the first whitepaper emerging medical domains are identified. In the latest whitepaper the specific problems and challenges related to open platforms for medical  devices are discussed.   The lighthouses are an instrument initiated by the European ECSEL/KDT funding program to streamline and focus European initiatives / projects in certain key areas, and one of them is Health. It is the mission of the Health.E lighthouse to accelerate innovation in medical devices by promoting the development and adoption...

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300 million euros for a new international stem cell consortium

Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC), the Danstem Institute at the University of Copenhagen and the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute in Melbourne will jointly receive 300 million euros from the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The aim of this new international consortium is to bring stem cell-based therapies from the laboratory to the patient. Stem cells offer a unique opportunity to repair tissue damaged by disease or trauma. The potential use is promising for the treatment of diabetes, metabolic diseases and inherited disorders, but substantial work is still needed to bring these stem cell therapies to patients. To accelerate this, the Novo Nordisk...

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Emulate Liver-Chip able to correctly identify 87% of drugs that caused drug-induced liver injury to patients

In a recent study now available on BioRxiv, researchers assessed the performance of 780 human Liver-Chips across a blinded set of 27 known hepatotoxic and non-toxic drugs. In line with the IQ MPS guidelines, the tested drugs included seven matched pairs that demonstrate the chip’s ability to distinguish toxic drugs from their less-toxic structural analogs. Furthermore, the study demonstrated that the Emulate Liver-Chip was able to correctly identify 87% of the tested drugs that caused drug-induced liver injury in patients despite passing through animal testing. At the same time, the Liver-Chip did not falsely flag any drugs as toxic, supporting...

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CEN-CENELEC Organ-on-Chip Focus Group Creation

The CEN-CENELEC kick off meeting of the new Focus Group on standardization of Organ-on-Chip will take place as a virtual event on March 2nd 2022. In April, the online workshop ‘Organ on Chip: Towards Standardization’ took place as the 2021 edition of Putting Science into Standards (PSIS) in collaboration with the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. The PSIS workshop gathered more than 200 participants from academia, industry, policy makers, regulatory experts, and standardizers. You can find out more about the workshop and the different themes and issues that were discussed over its two-day run in this event report published...

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New Eye-on-Chip models from Amsterdam UMC

The team of Prof Arthur Bergen, department of Human Genetics, Amsterdam UMC, has recently developed various human retina-on-a-chip models.These models represent a number of genetically determined eye diseases, such as age-related macula degeneration, glaucoma and retinitis pigmentosa. Next to WT models (Figure 1) , we have developed a number of CRISPR/Cas9 knock-out and iPSC-derived patient organoids (not shown) and a new class of biosynthetic organoids (Figure 2). Obviously, such models are essential for deep understanding of human eye development and disease pathology and to develop or test emerging therapies. According to recent international patient surveys, vision disorders reduce the quality...

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Fifth annual hDMT Consortium meeting online concludes the lustrum activities

In contrast to the previous ones, this year the annual hDMT Consortium meeting took place online as a half day meeting on November 12th. More than 110 participants, in particular many young researchers, joined the meeting that was chaired by Christine Mummery, chair of hDMT. New projects, that have started already or were just submitted for funding, were presented by the coordinators, and illustrated the many interdisciplinary collaborations, that are so characteristic for hDMT. Ten junior researchers showed their latest results about various Organ-on-Chip technologies and models and gave their view on the future research. The presentations were fascinating and...

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Two NWO Open Competition Grants for Angelo Accardo

The first project, funded by the Open Competition ENW-XS Grant (€ 50.000), is about 3D engineered brain cancer microenvironments for proton radiobiology and will be carried out in collaboration with the Leiden University Medical Center and the Holland Proton Therapy Center: “Glioblastoma is a devastating cancer of the brain with an extremely poor prognosis. A relatively new cancer treatment is radiotherapy with proton beams, which can be targeted to destroy cancer cells while sparing surrounding healthy tissue. However, despite the treatment’s compelling biological and medical rationale, little is known about the effects of protons on glioblastoma at the cellular level....

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Positive Evaluation of the NOCI Program

This week the results of the mid-term review were received. The funding for the Netherlands Organ-on-Chip Initiative (NOCI) program will be continued for a second term of 5 years. The NOCI program will continue until October 1st 2027.   The midterm review consisted of a Self-evaluation Report and an interview with a panel of experts to evaluate the request for financing of the second part of the program. The Self-evaluation Report was compiled by the consortium after which the report was critically reviewed by our ‘Critical Friends’ Matthias Lutolf (EPFL) and Don Ingber (Wyss) together with the Scientific Advisory Board...

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