Chemotherapy that does nothing until you irradiate it with light. Sylvestre Bonnet receives a Vici grant of 1.5 million euros for the development of this treatment. The Leiden chemist wants to build a new molecule to fight tumours that are at the time still difficult to treat.

How does the extracellular matrix coordinate endothelial cell behavior during angiogenesis, and how do metabolic waste-products and matrix-degrading enzymes produced by the tumour modify the extracellular matrix so as the change the cellular coordination?

Promotores: Prof.dr. M.K. Richardson, Prof.dr. H.P. Spaink

In this thesis, we will utilize embryonic zebrafish tumour models to understand the interaction between engrafted human cancer cells and macrophages from the host, test drug administration modalities and anti-cancer efficacies of newly-developed PDT and PACT compounds, and test a light-triggered liposomal…

What is the most effective way to eliminate tumour cells? The DNA repair mechanism could play an important role in increasing the effectiveness of chemotherapy in the fight against cancerous cells. If we are to influence this mechanism, we need fundamental knowledge about how the mechanism works.

Promotores: Wim Jiskoot; Ferry Ossendorp

Promotores: Prof.dr. P.C.W. Hogendoorn & Prof.dr. H.P. Spaink, Co-promotor: Dr. B.E. Snaar-Jagalska

Can zebrafish provide a fast, sensitive in vivo vertebrate model for identifying novel mechanisms of Ewing sarcoma progression and for development of new anticancer compounds in a time- and cost-effective manner?

Researchers at Leiden University have demonstrated that tumours can apply mechanical means to attract the blood vessels they need to be able to grow. The team published this discovery on 2 March in Nature Scientific Reports.

How to identify patients at risk of developing devastating, metastatic disease and facilitate the development of personalised treatment for prostate cancer patients?

Following their application to system biological models, control theory techniques have further potential to aid in the understanding and application of quantitative systems pharmacology models.

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?

We strive to address the challenge of constructing a modeling language to write software which can take advantage of recent hardware developments (multicore, cloud) without compromising in its abstraction levels.

Promotor: Roeland M.H. Merks

Science, Mathematical Institute (MI)

Erik Danen is looking at how to inhibit tumours that do not respond well to medicine – and he is making some headway. The Professor of Cancer Drug Target Discovery studies the interaction between tumour cells and their surroundings. Inaugural lecture on Friday 10 May.

This computational approach to the complexity of text comprehension is useful for describing the cognitive processes involved.

Existing work in probabilistic language modeling can be mostly divided into two categories: (i) Purely sequential, string-level approaches ensure fluency at the local level without notion of grammaticality and seek improvements in the use of massive training corpora. (ii) Fully structural, tree-based…

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)

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

Promotor: Prof.dr. E. Deprettere

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.

This dissertation studies the Asymptotics of Bayesian nonparametric inference for Gaussian linear models.

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.

Arts and leisure, Arts and leisure

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

... which build on self-regulation and stress-regulation theories and considers the modification of cognitions as a mediator of therapeutic change.

The molecular mechanisms that instigate a healthy cell to become malignant are fueled by (epi)genetic alterations in so-called driver genes.

How do surgeons avoid causing nerve damage or leaving cancerous cells behind? An interdisciplinary research group at the LUMC hopes to improve operations and make them less invasive with the aid imaging techniques. They are working with medical companies to make these techniques widely available.

Promotor: Prof.dr. F.S. de Boer, Co-promotor: D. Clarke

Promotor: Prof.dr. B. van de Water, Co-promotores: L.T.M. van der Ven, A.S. Kienhuis

Systems pharmacology aims to apply techniques from systems biology to pharmacological models.

Making a dynamic substance stock model in order to conduct scenario analyses and make forecasts.

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

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

Peter Grunwald

Promotor: Prof.dr. J.N. Kok, Co-promotor: F.J. Verbeek

ASLU 14

A team led by Erik Danen from the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research has received a 3 million euros NWO Science Groot grant to unravel the first steps of metastasis. Danen will work together with biologists and theoretical and experimental physicists from Dutch Universities. ‘Understanding these…

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.

From surface science towards industrial practice using high-pressure scanning tunneling microscopy.

In this thesis, we extend the concept of null models as canonical ensembles of multi-graphs with given constraints and present new metrics able to characterize real-world layered systems based on their correlation patterns.

Classical mathematical models treat space and time as a continuum, while it is sometimes more useful to regard it as granular. Hupkes is studying what this means for a number of important patterns that are often found in computer calculations and in nature.

Promotor: Prof.dr. W.J.G.M. Peijnenburg, Co-promotor: Dr. ing. M.G. Vijver

A research agenda

In this research project child language phonology is studied from the perspective of a psycholinguistic speech-production model and this model is in turn studied from the perspective of developmental phonology.

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.

Lysosomal storage disorders (LSDs) are a group of orphan diseases characterized by lysosomal dysfunction or impaired lysosomal catabolism and affect collectively about 1 in 5000 live births.

Chemical reactions go hand-in-hand with an energy exchange with the environment in which they take place. Surfaces offer a variety of energy dissipation channels, constituted by the nuclear and electronic degrees of freedom of the atoms at the interface. Aiming at an improved future harvesting of energy,…