It is a stormy Sunday afternoon, with gusts of a whopping 110 kilometres per hour. Chemist Teun Sweere defies the enormous headwind on his city bike and wins the NK Headwind cycling after 22,5 minutes. A new highlight follows six months later: his PhD defence (14 June).

Cancer is one of the main causes of death in the Netherlands. Leiden researchers are working to improve the treatment of different types of cancer in order to increase the patient’s quality of life. A better understanding of how cancer develops will make it possible to deliver personalised and precise…

Toxys, Leiden University and Leiden University Medical Center have agreed immediately to commercialise and also develop further the ToxProfiler technology invented at the two institutions. ToxProfiler allows for rapid toxicity hazard identification of novel and existing drugs, chemicals, and other substances.…

Nanoparticles exhibit a number of adjustable properties, e.g., their size, shape, and surface and core chemistry, which can be further diversified with different functional moieties. This opens a broad field for application in diagnostic and therapy. In this respect, the use of a polymeric hybrid material,…

Supervisor: Xue Yang

Supervisor: Gerard van Westen

Grants awarded to molecular physiology research

How can cell wall engineering approaches be used to improve streptomycetes for industry to make new antibiotics?

Currently, several successful vaccines are available. However, for pathogens with a highly variable genetic composition, and for which serum IgG antibodies are not a useful correlate of protection, effective vaccines are yet to be developed.

The AiChemist project (https://aichemist.eu) coordinated by Helmholtz Munich is an Innovative Doctoral Training Network funded through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA-DN) within the EU Horizon Research Framework, to the sum of €3 million. It brings together leading experts in AI, chemoinformatics…

A tantalizing concept that has emerged in our recent research is binding kinetics. An important parameter is residence time (RT), a direct reflection of how long a drug stays bound to its target. This parameter is of crucial importance, because drug action lasts only as long as the receptor-ligand complex…

The two-years MSc programme spans the entire spectrum of Analytical BioSciences, Biopharmaceutics, Drug Delivery Technology, Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology and Toxicology.

In 2020, Leiden University launched its stimulated interdisciplinary programs, including one focused on regenerative medicine.

More and more medicines are becoming available that target a tumour’s specific traits. The use of chemotherapy is continually undergoing improvement.

The Division of Systems Pharmacology and Pharmacy (SPP) aims to develop precision medicine approaches to characterise and predict variation in treatment response and enhance translational drug development strategies.

The predication of the effect (efficiency and toxicity) of a drug in a patient is very important in (i) clinical decision support and (ii) the development of novel drug treatments.

Patients share valuable advice and experiences with their peers in online patient discussion groups.

This thesis aimed to investigate core cross-linked polymeric micelles (CCPMs) and expand their potential for the delivery of hydrophobic drugs and co-factors.

Research in the BioTherapeutics research programme is aimed at a smoother and speedier transition from preclinical research to pharmacological interventions, and the delivery of drugs in the human body by use of small molecules and biologics.

Research from the Living Lab is important for society. For example, scientists from the Living Lab discovered that the pesticide thiacloprid is up to 2,500 times more harmful to insects than was thought on the basis of regular lab research. Partly because of this discovery, the European Commission decided…

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.

Do you recall all those drugs that were hastily proposed as potential treatments for COVID-19? In the event of a future pandemic, the goal is to offer an effective treatment more quickly and efficiently. To achieve this, a team led by Coen van Hasselt is developing a platform that can speed up the process…

While bioinformatics methods deal with the analysis of sequence information (be it proteins or DNA), the field of cheminformatics is concerned with the analysis of small-molecule datasets.

The Leiden Institute of Chemistry (LIC) is the basis for research and collaborations of the Leiden chemistry groups. Chemistry is the central science enabling a healthy future in a sustainable society. Chemistry researchers at Leiden University take a fundamental approach in finding tailored solutions…

Growth and development affect the metabolism of drugs administered to neonates, infants, and children.

Antibiotics are a class of medicine most people take for granted. But pathogenic bacteria are becoming more and more resistant to our antibiotics, and this poses a great challenge for future treatments. There is thus a great societal need to identify new molecules that can address new targets and be…

How can we implement the technique of pharmacological resting-state fMRI to improve the diagnosis of dementia?

New drugs for use as tuberculosis (TB) treatment are needed due to the constrains of classical antibiotics against TB and the rise of antibiotic-resistant strains, making TB a harder and harder disease to treat.

Designing and synthesizing high-affinity ligands for a given drug target have always been among the more important challenges in the drug discovery process.

Our research is aimed at a smoother and speedier transition from preclinical research to pharmacological interventions, and the delivery of drugs in the human body by use of small molecules and biologics.

Many students receive their first job offer during or right after their Business Studies internship. After graduating you can also aim for a career in Bio-Pharmaceutical research.

Our educational programmes span the entire spectrum of pharmaceutical education, from training of the next generation drug researchers in the areas of drug design, drug action, and drug use to educating the pharmacists of the future.

Leiden University and Leiden University Medical Center have joined the Netherlands Centre for One Health (NCOH), further strengthening the academic network in which such problems as antimicrobial resistance are studied.

The fact that scientists are increasingly better able to access molecular cell and tissue data also brings with it a new challenge: how can scientists find the information they need for research among the vast amount of data available?

Embryonic stem cells have the remarkable ability to develop into any type of cell. On their way to become for example a liver or a heart cell, they must repeatedly decide between alternative developmental paths. How they make these decisions is largely unknown. An international team of biophysicists…

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…

With cancer, a person’s body cells grow uncontrollably. Putting together a detailed picture of how this comes about makes it possible to develop efficient therapies. Researchers at the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) and Leiden University are working together to gain a better understanding…

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.

Methods of treatment for chronic illnesses are limited. Doctors and researchers at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) and Leiden University are working on new therapies as an alternative for organ transplants. The goal is to cure the illnesses by restoring organs to their original function. Stem…

Researchers at Leiden University have made a breakthrough in the study of the hereditary Pompe disease. Together with colleagues in York, they have developed a molecule that binds to the enzyme that is key to the progress of the disease. The findings have been published in ACS Central Science.

In this thesis, we used genetically engineered mouse models to identify genes and pathways that are involved in ILC formation and in the development of resistance to FGFR-targeted therapy.

Identifying the gaps in the legal framework for EU activities in the maritime security domain, and specifically in the areas of combating piracy, human smuggling or trafficking and drug trafficking.

Combining different disciplines, researchers work together to formulate innovative solutions to societal problems.

Key publications of the Quantitative Clinical Pharmacology group

Treatment with special stem cells seems to be a good option for suppressing the immune system in organ transplants. Researchers are trying to learn from processes that take place in the human body during pregnancy.

Researchers at LED3 are working together with biopharmaceutical company Galapagos to develop software for use in early drug discovery (funded by NWO). This software is able to design molecules with several simultaneously optimized characteristics and will also take prediction reliability into consideration…

Target selectivity is an important aspect of any drug molecule, and certainly a parameter to be optimized. That is not trivial for a number of reasons. First of all hundreds of drug targets (receptors, enzymes, ion channels) exist, and no single lab in the world has assays for all of them.