Developing new drugs is a difficult process. With the aid of artificial intelligence, Pharmaceutical scientist Xuhan Liu has developed methods that can help make drug design cheaper and faster. PhD defence on 15 February.

Providing each cancer patient with the right treatment remains a challenge. Oncode Accelerator aims to change this by innovating the way we develop cancer treatments, thus ensuring the patient is at the heart of the process.

Two consortia led by Leiden researchers have been awarded over one million euros by the Dutch Research Council and the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport to find solutions to antimicrobial resistance.

'It gave our team a big boost to hear that our work was valuable,' says medical chemist Elmer Maurits about the moment they won the Venture Challenge. With their company Iprotics, they want to develop a drug that can better treat patients with autoimmune diseases and blood cancers. 25,000 euros of prize…

The AtheroNeth consortium received €6 million from the Dutch Heart Foundation to gain a better understanding of the differences in disease progression among patients with atherosclerosis. The ultimate goal is to enable personalised treatment.

RARE-NL, a new collaboration between university hospitals, hopes to find treatments for rare diseases. Professor Teun van Gelder is representing the LUMC in the initiative.

There are more molecules that could conceivably be candidate drugs than there are stars in the universe. How can we ever efficiently identify those molecules? Professor of AI and Medicinal Chemistry, Gerard van Westen: ‘I’m going to use artificial intelligence as the co-pilot to make an automated search.’…

Bacteria carry countless hidden treasures in their DNA: fragments that could hold the key to new medicines. But how do you pick out the most promising ones from millions of options? ‘Look at the switches that turn genes on and off,’ says molecular biologist Gilles van Wezel.

Two Leiden researchers have been awarded ERC Proof of Concept grants. These grants, each worth EUR 150,000, will help the grantees in their efforts to bridge the gap from basic science to real-life applications

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?

Before patients can take a pill, scientists often spend years in the lab developing and testing a candidate drug. That often includes experiments with laboratory animals. As head of the rodent facility, Ilze Bot and her colleagues ensure that these experiments are conducted in an ethically responsible…

Not experiments and lab coats, but computers and artificial intelligence: this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to the inventors of the groundbreaking AI model, AlphaFold. This programme accurately predicts protein structures based on their genetic code—a crucial step in understanding biological…