Promotores: Wim Jiskoot; Ferry Ossendorp

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…

With a Vici grant of 1.5 million euros, Professor of Mathematical biology Roeland Merks will look for ways to fix messy and leaky blood vessels in tumours. His research combines mathematical simulations and lab experiments in a unique way.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

Plants that grow in patterns of stripes on the edge of deserts, plankton that live on the sea bed or oscillate in the water, and melanomas that spread throughout the body. Mathematician Lotte Sewalt discovered the common elements in these three systems. PhD defence 8 September.

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.K. Richardson, Prof.dr. H.P. Spaink

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.

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.

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

Promotor: Roeland M.H. Merks

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

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.

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.

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…

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

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. J.N. Kok

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

Growth hormone profiles are pulsatile and highly variable between individuals, limiting the implementation of mathemathical models to quantify an individual's secretion.

Promotor: Prof.dr. E. Deprettere

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

Promotor: F.H.J. Redig, Co-Promotor: W.T.F. den Hollander

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

Promotor: Prof.dr. B.R. Katzy, Co-promotor: R. Ortt

Promotor: M. Danhof, Co-promotores: J. Freijer, A. Yassen

Drug-target binding kinetics determine the time course of the central event in pharmacotherapy: Drug-target interaction.

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

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.

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…

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

Winning a prestigious award for PhD researchers, even before you have your doctorate: that's what Yascha van den Berg managed to do with his research proposal on alternatively spliced tissue factor, a protein that may be involved in tumour growth. Van den Berg: ‘It all started as a Friday afternoon…

The main aim of this thesis was to unravel the signaling and regulatory networks that drive tumor cell migration during breast cancer metastasis.

M. Danhof, Co-promotor: O.E. Della Pasqua

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

The Repository from the Drug Disease Model Resources (DDMoRe) consortium provides a home to a collection of computational models of disease and drug action that have been used in pharmaceutical and/or academic research. This publically available open-access resource will make it easier for researchers…

Promotores: J. Kok, M. Chaudron (Chalmers University)

We use zebrafish as a model organism to study human development and disease as well as animal welfare and environmental impact.

Simulation is a formal scientific method used to develop, compare and test hypotheses (models). In the last few decades the use of simulation has increased dramatically in virtually all scientific disciplines, but is still limited in archaeology due to the technological barrier – coding skills. Starting…

Promotor: Prof.dr. G.R. de Snoo, Co-promotores: Dr. ing. M.G. Vijver, J.P.M. Vink

Projects within the theme ‘Computational Biology’ aim to employ mathematical or computational dynamical modelling approaches to discover novel concepts that are important for drug development.

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.