The Faculty of Medicine

With an ageing population it is becoming increasingly important to find means to repair cells, tissue and organs through regenerative medicine.

Getting personal

Assessing and implementing new diagnostics strategies for stratifying patients

The mission in this research group, headed by Ad IJzerman, is to design and synthesize novel and better ligands for drug targets. Drug discovery is a lengthy but inspiring adventure. It is often an interplay between academic institutes and pharmaceutical industry, in which scientists at university develop…

Leiden University offers a unique interdisciplinary joint-degree Master programme in technical medicine together with TU Delft, Erasmus University Rotterdam and their academic medical centers.

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

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…

We are very happy to welcome you to spend a semester or year studying or doing an internship with us at the Leiden University Medical Center. Here you will find information on your course timetables and registration.

This Master programme will equip you with the necessary competences to play a key role in the emerging field of transfusion medicine. Its current concept includes both transfusion of blood components and hematopoietic transplants, cellular and tissue therapy and immunotherapy. Areas that are integrated…

Can we establish a new quality control system for herbal medicines that is based on bioactivity rather than a few abundant chemicals?

Wiskunde en Natuurwetenschappen, Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR)

Can drug screening for tuberculosis treatment be made more efficient?

Promotor: Jan van der Greef; Co-promotors: Mei Wang; Eduard van Wijk

Cell-based medicinal products (CBMPs) show great promise when it comes to the treatment of genetic disorders. However, there is limited knowledge about CBMP stability during their production, storage, and administration to patients. The main focus of my research is the characterization of CBMPs using…

Fascinated by science since high school, Alireza Mashaghi Tabari is driven to explore new ways of thinking in medicine. With a strong academic network, he educates students and gives public lectures. For his research at LACDR, he won the C.J. Kok Public Award 2018, making him the Faculty of Science's…

We have developed a microfluidic platform for complex 3D organotypic cell cultures (so-called organ-on-a-chip systems) which are suited for integration in 96 or higher well plate format.

Wiskunde en Natuurwetenschappen

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.

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…

Can the pink-pigmented microbe Methylobacterium extorquens be genetically engineered to convert the sustainable raw material methanol into antibiotics?

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

Collecting as much information as possible about administering a new medicine to people can save a lot of money.

What are the biological effects of Chinese herbal medicine in regulation of cancer cell metastasis?

Promotor: Prof.dr. E.F. Smets, Co-promotor: T.R. van Andel

Source: J Cheminform, Volume 6, Issue 1 (2014)

An investigation into how racial stereotypes were created and used in the European Middle Ages.

Medicines do not follow the one size fits all principle, because genetic differences can influence their efficiency. That is what research by PhD candidate Julia Hillger shows. She defends her PhD dissertation Take it Personal on Thursday 7 December.

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.

Putting our interns to work’ is the third-year slogan for the Master’s Programme in Medicine at Leiden University. After their regular residency periods, students are encouraged to find an internship in demanding sectors where they would like to work after completing their studies. In the MasterMindsChallenge,…

How such did the traditional text of the Sinews Transformation Classic remain interesting to a changing readership?

Mathematician Stéphanie van der Pas, winner of the C.J. Kok Jury Award for her PhD thesis in 2017, divides her time between research and education, and between pure mathematics and practical application.

What is the best method and time to test the effectiveness of medicines? PhD student Rob van Wijk of the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR) discovered zebrafish larvae are best used in drug research when they are five days old. His findings were published on 15 February in the journal…

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…

Can we link multiple components from herbal extracts with their biological activities?

Not taking into account the saturation of drug targets can lead to wrong conclusions about the duration of a drug's action. This is what former PhD candidate Wilbert de Witte writes together with the Leiden professors of pharmacology Meindert Danhof, Piet van der Graaf, and Liesbeth de Lange in Nature…

Andreas Bender, Assistant Professor for Medicinal Chemistry in the Medicinal Chemistry Division of the Leiden / Amsterdam Center for Drug Research, received the

Operating on tsunami victims, coordinating emergency aid during a civil war and the croaking of frogs in the surgery: Menno Swier worked as a doctor of tropical medicine in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. He is now a GP on Terschelling and here too there is never a dull moment.

Spirits play a important role in post-colonial and minority literature as a means of processing black pages from history, according to literary scientist Chia-Sui Lee. PhD defence 11 January.

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?

Promotor: J. van der Greef, T. Hankemeier; Co-promotor: H.A. van Wietmarschen

Personalised healthcare could be the answer to insufficient treatment of chronically ill people. Therefore, PhD Junzeng Fu tries to predict the response of a patient to a drug. Strikingly, she combines western medicine with Chinese medicine diagnosis. Promotion Tuesday 21 February.

Freek Janssen, a PhD-student in the department of Molecular Physiology, has received an award for the best oral presentation during the Young Medicinal Chemist Symposium organised by the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC-YMCS’16). Freek Janssen presented his work on “Development of Highly…

Laura Heitman is awarded the 2018 EFMC runner-up prize for a Young Medicinal Chemist in Academia

Cell-based medicinal products (CBMPs) belong to an innovative and heterogeneous group of medicines called advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs). The limited analytical toolbox for CBMP characterization and release testing is one of the reasons why CBMP development is so challenging.

The Sundanese people, the largest ethnic group in West Java, have been using traditional medicine for a long time. Known as ubar kampung, Sundanese indigenous knowledge, beliefs and practices of traditional medicine are based on local people’s knowledge and use of Medicinal, Aromatic, and Cosmetic (MAC)…

At the International Online Conference 'Fair Medicine and Artificial Intelligence' organised by the University of Tübingen (Germany), Hadassah Drukarch, junior researcher at eLaw, gave a presentation on how current algorithmic-based systems may reinforce biases in healthcare. This topic forms part of…