Glucocorticoids (GCs) are widely prescribed as anti-inflammatory drugs due to their well-established immunosuppressive effects.

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Can small molecule drugs restore the immune system’s ability to fight tuberculosis by boosting autophagy?

Why are not all children equally responsive to variations in the social environment?

The aim of this thesis was to study phage infection in Streptomyces, focused on cell wall-deficient cells. Bacteriophages (or phages in short) attach to the cell wall of bacteria after which they replicate and lyse the host cell.

Control of infectious diseases poses continuous challenges for human health.

Researchers at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) and Radboud university medical center have been given the green light to deliberately infect volunteers with malaria in order to test a highly promising vaccine on them.

The current resurgence of whooping cough is alarming, and improved pertussis vaccines are thought to offer a solution. Outer membrane vesicle vaccines (omvPV) are potential vaccine candidates, but omvPV-induced humoral responses have not yet been characterized in detail.

Promotor: G.F.A. Kersten, W. Jiskoot, Co-promotor: B. Metz

Research at the Macromolecular Biochemistry group is comprised of the following research themes:

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.

This thesis focuses on two processes involved in fighting infections: metabolism and immune cell motility and navigation.

Tuberculosis is a major global health problem caused by the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex, claiming more than a million lives annually.

Health workers have always sought ways to fight disease in vulnerable groups in the population. It is now clear that such research also benefits more prosperous countries. African worm infections and innovative thermometers have shown Leiden researchers how to fight diseases of affluence and keep health…

How can efficient chemical synthesis and clinical microbiology be combined to identify new antibiotics against Clostridioides difficile infections?

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

Professor of Ultrastructural Biology Ariane Briegel has received a grant in the NWO Open Competition Domain Science in the XS category. This grant emphatically encourages curiosity-driven and bold research with a maximum of 50,000 euros.

In STAYAHEAD data-intensive approaches are being developed to ”decode the human immunome” with a focus on a global vaccine strategy. They have developed a rapid mass spectrometric test to analyse in real-time large numbers of variants of SARS-CoV-2 and the host immune response, and use these data to…

Researchers from the Netherlands Cancer Institute, the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) and Oncode have created a tracking system that can reveal how often cells have divided. This allowed them to find a yet undiscovered population of immune cells: young memory cells that behave like stem cells.…

The outbreaks of AIDS and COVID-19 showed clearly how infectious viruses can influence people’s lives. Investigating the changes in the host metabolism may provide a paradigm shift to consider immune-metabolic interactions as therapeutic targets.

Promotor: Prof.dr. H.P. Spaink, Co-promotor: Prof. dr. A.H. Meijer

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is the phenomenon that pathogens become insensitive to the antibiotics that we use against them. A growing number of pathogens is becoming resistant, with methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) as the most famous example. But while the threat of AMR represents a slow-moving…

The Translational Immuno-Pharmacology group works on translating the efficacy of anti-infective therapy from preclinical (e.g. in vivo) to clinical, and is led by Rob van Wijk. Infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis, are in constant need of new therapies that work better, faster, and with less risk…

Uncover novel antimicrobials with prospective health benefits for sea turtles.

Macromolecular Biochemistry is a section of the Leiden Institute of Chemistry at Leiden University, comprising the PIs Marcellus Ubbink, Remus Dame, Lars Jeuken, Anne Wentink, Sebastian Geibel, Anjali Pandit, René Olsthoorn, Alia, and Steffen Brünle.

No less than four Leiden research teams have been awarded a grant by NWO. On 27 July NWO honoured 21 applications in the Open Competition ENW-XL. NWO awards the grants to consortia in the exact and natural sciences who are doing unconnected fundamental research that is 'driven by curiosity'.

Tuberculosis causes 1.5 million deaths yearly and anti-tuberculosis therapies are threatened by emergence of drug resistance. Development of innovative drug combinations should be accelerated with the use of translational pharmacological models. Moreover, host-directed therapies (HDT), which stimulate…

Parasitic worms and stomach bacteria suppress immune reactions such as allergic responses. Parasitologist Hermelijn Smits and lung specialist Christian Taube from the LUMC are trying to learn from these micro-organisms.

The Quantitative Pharmacology group headed by Coen van Hasselt focusses on the application of state-of-the-art quantitative pharmacometrics and systems pharmacology modeling combined with translational experimental models to develop personalized treatment strategies for antibiotics and to combat antimicrobial…

How do plants lure microscopically small 'support teams' into their roots for protection against diseases? And what functions are activated in the microbes and the plants?

Supervisor: P.J.J. Hooykaas

Aspergillus niger is an important industrial producer of organic acids and enzymes producing large amounts of spent fungal biomass.

People who have taken antibiotics in the past three months pay more attention to negative facial expressions, according to research by postdoc Katerina Johnson and assistant professor Laura Steenbergen. This may explain how antibiotics increase the risk of developing depression.

Antibiotic resistance, caused by widespread use of antibiotics, leads to bacterial infections that are difficult, if not impossible, to treat and is a major worldwide health concern.

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The focus of the Antiviral Pharmacology group led by Anne-Grete Märtson is optimizing antiviral therapy for different viral infections by conducting clinical trials and using innovative computational and dynamic laboratory methodologies.

Leiden professor of Cellular Immunology of Parasitic Infections Maria Yazdanbakhsh receives the prestigious NWO Spinoza Prize this year. This, in many ways, border-crossing scientist contributes with her research to more effective vaccines against parasitic infections and better medication for inflammatory…

Annemarie Meijer is appointed full Professor of Immunobiology. Meijer’s research focuses on immunobiology and infectious disease. She uses the zebrafish as a model for understanding mechanisms of host immune defense against intracellular bacterial pathogens.

Influenza CD8(+) T-cell epitopes are conserved amongst influenza strains and can be recognized by influenza-specific cytotoxic T-cells (CTLs), which can rapidly clear infected cells. An influenza peptide vaccine that elicits these CTLs would therefore be an alternative to current influenza vaccines,…

An overview of Quantitative Pharmacology projects

In this thesis, I study 1) metabolic alterations in tuberculosis related to wasting syndrome in human patients as well as in rodent and fish animal models. 2) effects of the mutation of the leptin gene on cachexia and diabetes in rodent and zebrafish animal models.

A COVID-19 vaccine that specifically instructs the immune system to produce T-cells rather than antibodies is shown to provide good protection in a mouse model, Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) researchers report in Nature Communications. According to them, the alternative vaccine may offer a…

Specific fatty acid-sugar molecules allow leprosy bacteria, among others, to hide from our immune system. How exactly is not entirely clear. Hessel van Dijk, who received his PhD on 13 October, replicated the molecules, helping to solve a piece of the puzzle. Van Dijk's dissertation is titled: Synthesis…

The infectious diseases malaria and tuberculosis are responsible for 2.1 million deaths every year. Leiden researchers are currently testing a new tuberculosis vaccine.

The enormous adaptability of the cholera bacterium explains why it is able to claim so many victims. Professor Ariane Briegel from the Leiden Institute of Biology has now discovered that this adaptability is due to rapid sensory changes in the bacterium. Publication in PNAS.