The Graduate School of Science starts 2024 with a new Dean. The Faculty Council appointed Erik Danen for the coming four years. He succeeds Eric Eliel, who has held the position since May 2020.

Since the start of the Corona crisis, several COVID-19 related research and teaching projects were started at LACDR. The computational and teaching activities started right away, as well as a large-scale metabolomics screening program by Thomas Hankemeier’s group. Other experimental activities are still…

Enabling volume-restricted metabolomics using next-generation microscale analytical tools.

Promotor: C.A.M.J.J. van den Hondel, Co-promotor: Sandra de Weert

Gerard van Westen (LACDR/division of medicinal chemistry) has been awarded with a VENI grant from NWO, the Dutch Research Council.

Tumours act like mini-organs, manipulating their environment and using bodily processes to survive and metastasise. Through research by Erik Danen and his colleagues, we are learning more about the complex nature of tumour cells. In the Dutch newspaper NRC, the scientists discuss their findings.

Promotor: Prof.dr. H.P. Spaink Co-promotor: Dr. B.E. Snaar

Late in 2015 a woman gave birth to a baby conceived following the reimplantation of thawed ovarian tissue. The woman was able to become pregnant thanks to transplantation of the tissue that took place in the LUMC.

This thesis describes the design, characterization and application of dextran based crosslinked network.

The Department of Medical Microbiology at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) is researching antiviral drugs that could treat and prevent SARS-CoV-2 in various projects. One part of the PanCoroNed project is being led by Martijn van Hemert and involves lab tests into the antiviral effect of molecules…

The American president Trump is considering military intervention in Mexico to get rid of the drug cartels once and for all, but Mexico is not interested in other countries' interventions. According to Jelle van Buuren, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Trump's much…

Research question

With an MSc degree in BPS and Science Communication & Society you are well prepared for a broad array of career prospects in research or industry. The master’s degree is an excellent preparation for a career at the interface of science and public affairs.

Tackling key challenges of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry to aid drug discovery is one of the focus areas of Leiden University. To this end, the Leiden Early Drug Discovery & Development network (LED3) was established by the Leiden Institute of Chemistry (LIC), the Institute of Biology Leiden…

Research at the MCBIM group is comprised of the following research themes:

Supervisor: Natalia Ortiz Zacarías

From molecule, to cell, to organism. The high-level drug research at the Cell Observatory aimes at reducing the spread of cancer and developing new medicines for tuberculosis.

Medicines are becoming increasingly precise and innovative, but at the same time increasingly expensive. With their innovations, it is up to universities to increase competition, thus causing prices to drop. This is what newly appointed Professor of Biomolecular Analysis Hubertus Irth argues. His inaugural…

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From time to time, manuscripts that have remained hidden for centuries turn up in library collections and archives. In the archives of the 17th-century Bibliotheca Thysiana at the Rapenburg in Leiden, kept in the Leiden University Library, Rotterdam researcher Erik-Jan Bos discovered a hitherto unknown…

One of the holy grails of drug research is to be able to assess the safety of chemicals and pharmaceuticals without using laboratory animals. Researchers from Leiden University, among others, now receive a grant from the National Science Agenda to pursue that goal.

Archaeologist Bjørn Peare Barthold suspected farmers in a doctorless 19th century Dutch village may have been self-medicating to manage pain and disease. By examining the skeletons' dental calculus this hypothesis could be tested. Science Magazine interviewed him about this new technique.

In a remote cave on the Indonesian island of Borneo, a series of rock art paintings have been discovered. The oldest painting might be the oldest-known example of figurative cave art. Wil Roebroeks, not himself involved in this project, reflects on the findings in several media.

Indira Nederpelt was elected as the winner of the Young Investigator Award for best oral presentation titled ‘’Kinetic characterization of clinically used GnRH peptide agonists’’.

An interdisciplinary team of Leiden researchers has discovered that wasting syndrome, a severe byproduct of tuberculosis, is the same for all humans and animals studied. The discovery offers new opportunities to investigate the still insufficiently understood condition. The scientists also developed…

A month ago it was Marc Baggelaar, and now Hans Kistemaker too has obtained his PhD cum laude at the Leiden Institute for Chemistry (LIC). ‘He has made ground-breaking contributions to the world of protein modification,’ says PhD supervisor Gijs van der Marel. Kistemaker obtained his PhD on 11 May…

Physics and Engineering Approaches to Biomedicine and Pharmacology

Health is a wonderful gift, both for humans and for society. If we are able to prevent both physical and mental illnesses, we can spare a lot of suffering and fight rising health costs. Social scientists and physicians in Leiden are working closely together to conduct research on the human mental, behavioural…

Development of Natural Resource for New Medicines

The intradermal administration route is attractive for vaccine delivery, because of the highly populated antigen-presenting cells in the skin. However, the skin’s main physical barrier, the stratum corneum, prevents vaccines from entering the skin.

This thesis explores different avenues to develop insurmountable antagonists for CC Chemokine Receptors, such as CCR1, CCR2 and CCR5.

Glycoside hydrolases (glycosidases/GHs) are widely abundant enzymes in all kingdoms of life and are important biocatalysts that catalyze the hydrolysis of glycosidic linkages in oligo/polysaccharides, glycoproteins and glycolipids with tremendous efficiency

The Centre for Computational Life Sciences

We perform multidisciplinary research at molecular, cellular, and organismal levels of animal biology to increase fundamental understanding of health and disease.

Due to the modern techniques of combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening, data on the biological activity of many millions of compounds is known. However, it is still very difficult to transfer this data into knowledge: if we know that compounds A and B bind to a certain protein with high…

The British police discovered 39 bodies in the back of a lorry earlier this month. The refrigeration unit in which the bodies were found had entered the United Kingdom via Belgium.

The chemical industry must continue to innovate for a more sustainable, healthier society. The reseachers from the Leiden Institute of Chemistry (LIC) contribute by applying their knowledge to themes such as sustainability, energy and health.

Last year, chemists Dennis Wander and Hermen Overkleeft contributed to an important discovery about a widely used cancer drug. Their research has now been recognised as Finalist for the PNAS Cozzarelli Prize in the Biomedical Sciences class.

Promotor: Prof.dr. T. Hankemeier, Co-Promotores: T. Reijmers, L. Coulier

The cannabinoid CB2 receptor (CB2R) represents a promising therapeutic target for various forms of tissue injury and inflammatory diseases. Although numerous compounds have been developed and widely used to target CB2R, their selectivity, molecular mode of action and pharmacokinetic properties have…

Synthesis and application of chemical biology tools to study immunomodulatory signaling lipids.

The League of European Research Universities (LERU) is a group of 24 leading European research universities.

This is an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility project of the Faculty of Sciences with one partner in Ukraine.

The overall objective of this project is to identify novel drug candidates that are capable of slowing down the progression of neurodegeneration in the subset of Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients with overt mitochondrial dysfunction. Multimodal phenotypic characterisation of cohorts of monogenic PD…

ChEMBL is a large-scale drug discovery database containing bioactivity information primarily extracted from scientific literature.

On Friday the 29th of October, LACDR presented highlights of its research and teaching program during an online Lunchtime Talk session at the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

The ability to collect and interpret huge quantities of data has become indispensable to society and academia. Leiden University is a knowledge and expertise centre for data science that places the emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation.