News

Scientists in Leiden are looking for signals in blood samples to predict whether patients will develop serious COVID-19 symptoms or not. Based on that knowledge, they will be able to propose targeted therapies to prevent serious symptoms. They hope to come up with the first results within the week. Traces of diseases in the body ... Read more

hDMT researcher Angelo Accardo, expert in the area of Soft Micro- and Nano-system Technology for Life Sciences and Biology, received the TU Delft Health Initiative Pilot award. The pilot project deals with the development of standardized, reproducible and physiologically relevant 3D engineered cell microenvironments (3D Onco-Scaffolds) to be... Read more

Due to the global COVID-19 developments, the WC11 organization decided to postpone the 11th World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Science to August 22-26, 2021. The venue of the congress will remain the MECC Maastricht in the Netherlands. This decision also reflects public health concerns, and acknowledges the... Read more

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the EUROoCS 2020 meeting will not be held in Uppsala on 8 and 9 July 2020 but will be replaced by a virtual meeting on the same days. The online meeting will be organized and supported by the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Don't miss the opportunity to listen to exciting talks, chat... Read more

The International Society for Stem Cell Research has transformed its annual scientific meeting ISSCR on 23-27 June, into a virtual experience, bringing the global stem cell community together to share knowledge, collaborate, and network. Will you join? Join ISSCR and your colleagues for The Global Stem Cell Event - and take part in... Read more

hDMT and the European Organ-on-Chip Society (EUROoCS) were represented during a three-day workshop in Berlin in June 2019, where 46 leading experts gathered to identify the challenges and hurdles as well as the solutions for the adoption of Microphysiological Systems (MPS), including Organ-on-Chip models. In an open discussion the... Read more

Researchers from the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht, Erasmus MC University Medical Center Rotterdam, and Maastricht University in the Netherlands using human intestinal organoids, have found that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, can infect cells of the intestine and multiply there. These findings could explain the observation... Read more

Britt van der Leeden recently joined the group of hDMT PI Sue Gibbs of the Amsterdam UMC, location VUMC. She is going to work on a Skin-on-Chip with flow, for research on neutrophil extracellular trap formation (NETosis) that drives burn-induced thrombosis and wound deepening. It is recently found that extensive microvascular thrombosis... Read more

ZonMW has published on May 1, 2020, the subsidy call 'COVID-19 Bottom-up focus area 1&2'. This call focuses on two of the three focus areas of the COVID-19 programme, namely 1. predictive diagnostics and treatment and 2. care and prevention. Within this call, a separate budget has been allocated for animal-free innovations by... Read more

Andrew Morrison recently joined the group of hDMT PI Sue Gibbs of the Amsterdam UMC, location VUMC. He is going to work on the Lymph node-on-Chip model project. This project is in collaboration with the Amsterdam Rheumatology Center for Autoimmune Diseases (ARCAID) in order to develop a functional 3D organotypic lymph node with integrated... Read more

From October 2019 to January 2020, secondary school students could take part in a Pre-University Online Course from the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. One of the three modules dealt with Heart-on-Chip, researching living cells and tissues with the help of a chip: a new technology to learn more about the development of diseases... Read more

Alireza Mashaghi and his colleagues from the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research have successfully developed an Organ-on-Chip model that imitates the most dangerous symptoms of Ebola. This new chip is used to test new drug candidates. The first results are promising and published in iScience. Currently, the World Health Organization and... Read more

The Neuro-Nanoscale Engineering research group of Microsystems section of hDMT PI Regina Luttge at the Eindhoven University of Technology sheds light on how microsystems technology can benefit 3D Nervous-systems-on-Chip models. The Neuro-Nanoscale Engineering group welcomes Dr. Yagmur Demircan Yalcin as a postdoc fellow. She is working... Read more

The second edition of the conference 'Life-on-Chip - Enabling personalized medicine by cross-over innovation' attracted almost 200 participants. A resounding success, according to the organizing parties. This year's conference was dominated by innovations in life sciences and crossovers with other technologies such as micro- and... Read more

Cancer mutations in the colon can be caused by common gut bacteria that produce the carcinogen colibactin. This was demonstrated by researchers from Hubrecht Institute (KNAW) and Princess Máxima Center in Utrecht in the Netherlands. The results of this research were published in Nature. By exposing cultured human mini-guts (organoids)... Read more

The European Partnership for Alternative Approaches to Animal Testing (EPAA) is proud to announce that a call for submissions is now open for its 2020 3Rs Science Prize. Application deadline: 5 October 2020 at 12:00 (noon) Brussels time The EPAA aims to promote the development, validation and acceptance of 3Rs alternative approaches... Read more

In nearly two years the EU-funded ORCHID project built a roadmap for Organ-on-Chip (OoC) technology and established a European network in this promising field. "ORCHID clearly identified strengths of the field in Europe, but also the needs, challenges and barriers of the technology towards a European roadmap," states project... Read more

BI/OND challenges every Organ-on-Chip company such as River BioMedics, Darwin Microfluidics and BEOnChip (Biomimetic Environment On-Chip) to contribute by donating to research groups. "Today we are donating a set of chips for a Lung-on-Chip model to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EFPL) in Lausanne and researcher Vivek... Read more

Dutch start-ups with Organ-on-Chip technology are attracting worldwide attention at the Start-up Grind Conference in Silicone Valley. That reflects the front page of the Dutch newspaper Trouw in the article 'A chip that beats like a heart and grows like a tumour.' Thanks to the cultivation of organ tissue on an advanced chip, every... Read more

Jorik Amesz, a biomedical engineering master student from Delft University of Technology, came just before the lockdown back from Spain after an internship of six months. Last year, he followed the lecture of professor Ronald Dekker about Organ-on-Chips and became enthusiastic about the research field. Via Dekkers contacts and the hDMT... Read more

In February, het Financieele Dagblad, a Dutch newspaper which focuses on business and financial matters, highlighted the high promise of Organ-on-Chip technology for drug development in a big story entitled "A complete Body-on-Chip". Besides Mimetas and Galapagos, hDMT managing director Janny van den Eijnden-van Raaij and hDMT PI... Read more

The fourth annual hDMT Consortium Meeting took place on Friday February 14, 2020, again at the English Meeting Center in Rotterdam. The meeting illustrated the enthusiastic interdisciplinary interactions that characterize hDMT. Junior and senior researchers mingled in an open and cordial atmosphere. The hDMT Consortium Meetings have become an... Read more

This annually recurring open Call, organized by Holland High Tech, links high tech research innovations in public-private partnerships to social themes. Scientists can win an amount of € 25,000 for a research project performed in collaboration with at least one entrepreneur. The Call for Proposals 2020 is... Read more

Associate Professor of Pharmacology Antoinette Maassen van den Brink from the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, will receive 1.5 million euros from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for research on migraine and risk on cardiovascular disease. This Vici grant will enable her to expand her research and team over the... Read more

On Wednesday 1 April 2020, hDMT chair Christine Mummery, professor of Developmental Biology at Leiden University Medical Centre, explained on Dutch television why we still need animal testing. You can see the broadcast here (in Dutch, 11 min) If you want to learn more, Mummery answers four more questions of viewers after the broadcast... Read more