News

New laboratory techniques can help solve the shortage of donor liver, argues hDMT PI professor Luc van der Laan in the Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad, on the occasion of his oration 'Heal the liver'. Mini livers He also tells about building liver tissue in a petri dish. In this way, scientists can mimic the complete liver... Read more

The initiative of the University of Twente, a partner of hDMT, for an open standard 'Translational Organ-on-Chip Platform (TOP)' won the Philips Innovation Services 'Start-up of the Year Award' at the International MicroNano Conference 2019 in Utrecht (NL) Berend van Meer (UTwente, LUMC) pitched the platform technology that... Read more

Brain cells of people with intellectual disabilities or certain developmental disorders communicate differently than brain cells of people without those disorders. Researchers at the Radboudumc have discovered this by comparing the electrical brain waves of both groups. Their findings were recently published in Nature Communications and... Read more

The TURBO programme of the Radboudumc and the University of Twente has awarded Michel van Putten (UTwente) and Nael Nadif Kasri (Radboudumc) for their technical-medical research proposal 'EEG in-a-dish: towards PRecisIoN mediCine for EpilepSy (PRINCES).' Epilepsy or epileptic seizures give an abnormal electrophysiological picture,... Read more

The TURBO programme of the Radboudumc and the University of Twente has awarded Andries van der Meer (UT) and Frans Russel (Radboudumc) for their technical-medical research proposal 'Modulation of endothelial urate toxicity by urate transporters as a new personalized prevention strategy for atherosclerosis.' Foto credits: Blood... Read more

PhD candidate Milica Dostanic of the Electronic Components, Technology and Materials group (ECTM) of Delft University of Technology, partner of hDMT, won the Best Poster Award at this year's International MicroNano Conference in Utrecht (NL) with her poster titled "A miniaturized EHT platform for contractile tissue... Read more

How can we better understand the process of fertilization in mammals? Thanks to a new member of the Organs-on-Chip family, Dr Bart Gadella and his colleagues at the faculty of Veterinary Medicine at Utrecht University are able to study fertilization and reproduction. They developed an Oviduct-on-Chip that enables them to use cow gametes obtained... Read more

Reducing the number of cardiac arrests, brain infarcts and heart failure and preventing them from occurring in the future as much as possible, that is the aim of the study 'Growing hearts on a chip'. In order to obtain research funding, postdoc Verena Schwach, of the group of hDMT PI Robert Passier of the University of Twente, has... Read more

Just before the severe typhoon Hagibis hit Tokyo, over 1200 companies and research organizations from 34 countries gathered at Pacifico Yokohama in Japan from 9-11 October 2019. Among the participants were hDMT, Leiden University Medical Center, TNO, Mimetas and several other companies from the Netherlands. In addition to exhibitions and... Read more

Health.E aims to accelerate innovation in medical devices and systems by stimulating the development of open technology platforms and standards, thereby moving away from the inflexible and costly point solutions that presently dominate electronic medical device manufacturing. Open technology platforms, supported by roadmaps, will generate the... Read more

One of the building blocks of the Organ-on-Chip roadmap is 'Standardization'. Lack of standardization, automation and inter-chip incompatibility is limiting End Users in adopting Organ-on-Chip (OoC) solutions. Much like all computer equipment interfaces through a Universal Serial Bus (USB), biologist should be able to use chips from... Read more

Parkinson's disease causes brain cells that produce the neurotransmitter dopamine to die. But where does the disease start? Evidence suggests that a failure of the brain's immune system may be the root cause of the disease. hDMT researcher Amalia Dolga, Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen's Department of... Read more

On Monday 14 October 2019, Professor Christine Mummery gave the annual John Burdon Sanderson Lecture, this year entitled 'Cardiovascular diseases and drugs: hiPSC models moving forward'. The annual lecture is held in honour of John Burdon Sanderson, the University of Oxford's first Waynflete Professor of Physiology, after whom... Read more

During the 46th Annual ESAO (European Society for Artificial Organs) Congress on 'Smartificial Devices for our Future' in Hannover from 3-7 September 2019 Organ-on-Chip was introduced as a new topic in the field of the European Society for Artificial Organs. The symposium EUROoCS@ESAO was a joint effort of EUROoCS and ESAO to... Read more

Giulia Campostrini from the Department of Anatomy and Embryology has been awarded an Individual Fellowship from the Horizon2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions programme. Cardiomyocytes Campostrini works in the group of Prof. Christine Mummery on cardiomyocytes from human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs). "These cells are a... Read more

Prof. dr. Hans Clevers wins the Keio Medical Science Prize 2019 for his groundbreaking work on stem cells and organoids. The Keio University in Japan annually awards this prize. Clevers receives the award for his research into a molecular process named the Wnt pathway. The process plays a crucial role in the development of stem cells and... Read more

At the annual Science Open Day, Sunday October 6th at Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC), Laura Windt - PhD student in Prof. Dr. Christine Mummery's lab - held a talk on a potential solution to that question: Organ-on-Chip containing personalized stem cells. Windt explained how Organ-on-Chip research is step-by-step beginning... Read more

Prof. Christine Mummery, Dr. Franck Lebrin and Dr. Valeria Orlova, members of the hDMT Vessel-on-Chip Theme Group, together with doctors at St Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein, receive a grant for research into Rendu Osler Weber's disease. The sum of 500,000 euros comes from ZonMw's Translational Research programme. The researchers... Read more

The Lush Prize offers a global prize fund to support initiatives to end or replace animal testing. The prestigious prize fund of at least £250,000 is available across five categories: Lobbying, Training, Public Awareness, Science, and Young Researchers. A sixth category, known as the 'Black Box' prize, also provides the possibility... Read more

Nature published in News in Focus (1 October 2019) that India is one of the latest countries joining a growing wave of nations looking at emerging technologies like organs-on-chip as alternatives for the use of animals in research. The technologies that model human organs and diseases are fast improving and becoming reliable models for testing... Read more

In the Dutch newspaper NRC, chair of hDMT and Professor of Developmental Biology Christine Mummery tells about miniature hearts, made of stem cells and microchips, for research into heart failure and other diseases. Additional advantages of such a miniature organ: less animal testing and cheaper medicines. Source: NRC Een hart zo groot... Read more

Researchers at Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC), partner of hDMT, have for the first time succeeded in measuring the three most important physical features of a beating cardiac cell: contraction, electrical action potential and calcium flux, simultaneously in the laboratory. Taken together, these properties cause the cardiac cell to beat,... Read more

Horizon 2020 FET-Open project Organ-on-Chip In Development (ORCHID GA #766884) is close to completion. On 23 September 2019 the achievements of ORCHID and future perspectives were discussed during a dynamic interactive final ORCHID meeting in Leiden, the Netherlands. 35 participants from 14 different countries, including scientists from... Read more

The first annual conference of the European Organ-on-Chip Society (EUROoCS) in Graz in Austria on the 2nd and 3rd of July this year was a great success. The impressive old campus of the Graz University of Technology, with its nice Lecture Hall and the historic Aula in EUROoCS colors, was filled with 214 enthusiastic participants from 18... Read more

Delft University of Technology and hDMT welcomes Dr. Angelo Accardo, who joined the Department of Precision and Microsystems Engineering (PME) at TU Delft as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Soft Micro- and Nanosystem Technology for Life Sciences and Biology since June 1st 2019. During his PhD and Post-doctoral activity, Angelo... Read more