ASLU 14

A research agenda

Are predictive archaeological maps a reliable tool to play an important role in the spatial planning? One of the goals of this project was to develop best practices for the production and application of the models.

Promotor: P.D. Grünwald

An integrated approach for the simultaneous prediction of polypharmacology and binding affinity/potency of small molecules.

Describe and identify what dosimetry parameters are of importance to interpret dose-response relationships (eg., mortality, sub-lethal, growth or reproduction inhabitation, DNA damage and reactive oxygen species, etc. ) for metal-based nanoparticles? How to develop quantitative models that enable to…

An integrated approach of physiological concepts, advanced statistical approaches and large clinical datasets.

Clinical development of drugs for central nervous system (CNS) disorders has been particularly challenging and still suffers from high attrition rates.

He’s a fast and animated speaker, which is only logical because Gerard van Westen is driving an express train. His destination? A virtual human, consisting of algorithms that predict what an administered substance will do in the body. The train is already a long way down the line and the pharmaceutical…

Source: J Cheminform, Volume 7, Issue 1 (2015)

Alternatives to current practice

The main objective of this thesis was to develop clinically relevant survival models for patients with high-grade soft tissue sarcoma of the extremities, in particular the development and validation of prediction models for use in clinical practice.

A novel mathematical model describes spatial-temporal drug distribution within one or more brain units, which are cubic representations of a piece of brain tissue with brain capillaries at the edges.

The research in this dissertation aims to optimise blood donation processes in the framework of the Dutch national blood bank Sanquin. The primary health risk for blood donors is iron deficiency, which is evaluated based on donors' hemoglobin and ferritin levels.

Prof. Elizabeth de Lange is concerned with the allocation of resources for the conduct of science towards the goal of best serving the public interest. Also, while she underscores that there is still the need for using animals in drug research, she is concerned about this use, and advocates the use…

The kidneys play a major role in the elimination of drugs. In children, the exact age-related physiological changes underlying kidney function remain largely unknown.

The project Deconstructing Stability aims to improve reconstructions of late prehistoric landscapes and predictive models for the purpose of archaeological heritage management.

The aim of this research area is to be able to predict human drug response on the basis of mathematical models that are developed using preclinical experiments and prior knowledge.

Clearance is the most important pharmacokinetic parameter for drug dose selection. Pharmacokinetic information is typically first available in the adult population, and in general only limited pharmacokinetic data are available in children when drugs enter into the market. It is therefore of the utmost…

A complex community of microbes develops in the infant gut shortly after birth. We call this community the infant gut microbiota. The microbiota influences the health of the infant, which makes the composition and function of the infant gut microbiota an important topic to study.

Researchers of the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) have started a 4 year project on developing a system that sends out automatic alerts when components from engines are showing first signs of fatigue.

Researchers from the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) have developed an AI model that accurately predicts the risk of endometrial cancer recurrence.

Do medicines arrive in the right amount at the right spot in our brain? By making a model that depicts our brain in small 'brain blocks', Esmée Vendel tries to find an answer to this question. Her new, mathematical model predicts the concentration of medicines in the brain over time and space. Vendel…

Industrial manufacturing processes, such as the production of steel or the stamping of car body parts, are complex semi-batch processes with many process steps, machine parameters and quality indicators.

In the future, physicians may be able to identify dementia much earlier than they can today because a computer algorithm will be able to predict from brain scans how our memory is going to develop.

Stars orbit black holes while jumping up and down. This is the prediction of a theoretical model developed by Leiden physicist Satish Kumar Saravanan, based on Einstein’s theory of relativity. He defends his PhD thesis on July 7th.

The field of exoplanet research is rapidly advancing through the development of new technology, observing techniques, and post-processing methods.

Accurate prediction of the unbound drug concentration-time profile at the CNS target site is crucial for the assessment of the right drug concentration-effect relationship. PBPK models have supported the PK prediction of the CNS target sites and the translation of PK data between species and between…

Description of Biotic ligand models: making an inventory of available models & assessment of the variability of the predicted HC5 using the BLMs in different Dutch water types (2005 - 2007)

Supervisor: Gerard van Westen

Assistant Professor Vedran Dunjko and his team received a gift from Google to support their quantum research. The research focuses on whether quantum computers can provide new ways of understanding the mysteries of high-energy physics.

Can the (industrial) herbal extraction process be mathematically described and can this model be used to optimize the extraction in terms of quality and economical parameters?

Promotores: Prof.dr. M. Danhof, Prof.dr. D.R. Stanski

In this project, we aim to develop mathematical models to mechanistically and quantitatively predict the dynamics of cellular stress pathway activation and its relation with toxic effects when cells are exposed to various toxicants.

Promotor: Prof.dr. B. van de Water, Co-promotor: L.S. Price

In this article, Yannick Veilleux-Lepage and Tommy van Steen, assistant professors at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, discuss the degree of consensus within the field of terrorism studies regarding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the activities of violent non-state actors.

In this work, we attempt to answer the question:

The past two years, Laura van der Knaap and Professor Karsten Lambers worked on creating open teaching materials on agent-based modeling, funded by Erasmus+ and in collaboration with Danish, Irish and Dutch partners. Programming is an important skill involved in this, which is often seen as intimidating…

Less than 1 in 10 drug candidates that enter phase 1 clinical trials actually gets approved for human use.

In this thesis population pharmacokinetic and physiologically-based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) approaches were applied to investigate the influence of glomerular filtration (GF) and active tubular secretion (ATS) on renal clearance in children.

The research of this PhD project can be subdivided into two main disease areas: migraine and stroke. For both we will be investigating how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques can be used to study these afflictions, their (early) detection, and their potential treatment.

It is a common technique in global optimization with expensive black-box functions to learn a surrogate-model of the response function from past evaluations and use it to decide on the location of future evaluations.

Real-life processes are characterized by dynamics involving time. Examples are walking, sleeping, disease progress in medical treatment, and events in a workflow.

The project XAIPre (pronounce “Xyper”) aims to develop predictive maintenance system for the maritime industry using sensor technology and artificial intelligence. The project aims at developing Explainable Predictive Maintenance (XPdM) algorithms that do not only provide the engineers with a prediction…

A new study in Nature Plants has explored the most important organising principles that control vegetation behaviour. The insights from this study can be used to improve predictions on climate change. Leiden scientists Peter van Bodegom and Nadia Soudzilovskaia participated in the study.

Source: Structure , Volume 22, Issue 8, pp. 1120-1139 (2014)

Prediction of human (CNS) target site concentrations in health and disease In the vision of Prof. de Lange we will only be able to predict human (central nervous system, CNS) target site concentrations and effects if we perform systematic, condition-dependent, integrative, and strictly quantitative…

This thesis consists of five chapters on how to construct prediction sets for different types of data and models in a parametric or nonparametric Bayesian paradigm.

Main challenges in skin vaccination are overcoming the stratum corneum (SC) barrier and targeting the antigen presenting cells (APC) in the epidermis and the dermis.

The advanced insights obtained for the CNS PBPK model development are currently used to develop advanced mathematical models for drug distribution prediction in other body tissues protected by barriers, such as the gut. The gut PBPK model will be linked to drug effects for treatment of colon cancer.