Cancer is one of the main causes of death in the Netherlands. Leiden researchers are working to improve the treatment of different types of cancer in order to increase the patient’s quality of life. A better understanding of how cancer develops will make it possible to deliver personalised and precise…

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.

To inhibit proteins that contribute to the growth of aggressive cancer cells, that’s the plan of Professor Bob van de Water and his team. They will receive over 700,000 euros from the KWF Dutch Cancer Society for their research. Researcher Maaike Vreeswijk and pathologist Danielle Cohen are affiliated…

In the literature, several types of microneedles have been extensively described. However, porous microneedle arrays only received minimal attention. Hence, only little is known about drug delivery via these microneedles. However, porous microneedle arrays may have potential for future microneedle-based…

Source: Nature Biotechnology, Volume 2014, Issue June (2014)

Promotor: A.P. IJzerman Co-promotor: L.H. Heitman

Analysis of drug adversity

He’s a fast and animated speaker, which is only logical because Gerard van Westen is driving an express train. His destination? A virtual human, consisting of algorithms that predict what an administered substance will do in the body. The train is already a long way down the line and the pharmaceutical…

Promotor: Prof.dr. A.P. IJzerman, Co-Promotor: Dr. L.H. Heitman

PhD defence

High throughput microscopy

Zebrafish-human communication shows that cancer cells lacking a signaling protein are less able to develop aggressive metastatic properties. This discovery has been made by molecular cell biologist Claudia Tulotta. PhD defence 14 June.

PhD candidate Dennis Wander searches for the best of both worlds. That is to say: a cancer drug that is effective and also has minimal side effects. To this end, he makes new molecules inspired by two existing medicines. And not without result: ‘We have created a new variant that is very promising.’…

A next, general pharmacological problem to be tackled is how drug-target binding kinetics in vivo, affects target occupancy as an important indicator of the time-course of drug effects.

Harm reduction in practice: a comparative analysis of the Dutch and Brazilian approach towards drug users.

High-throughput holistic preclinical screens are increasingly used in drug discovery, to assess both drug efficacy and drug safety.

Ewa Snaar-Jagalska, Shuning He and colleagues from IBL, LION and LACDR reported on a new zebrafish study to understand micrometastasis of human cancer cells. They discovered a novel role for neutrophils in assisting metastasis formation, which provides critical insights for anti-cancer therapies.

PhD student Esmee Koedoot studied the underlying processes responsible for metastases in a dangerous type of breast cancer. She hopes to find new possibilities to fight the disease. In December 2019 she obtained her doctorate cum laude.

Promotor: B. van de Water

Pharmaceutical research should make more use of data science, says Gerard van Westen, postdoctoral fellow at the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR). ‘If we want to have better drugs, we should start with data.’

Diacylglycerol lipases (DAGLα and DAGLβ) are responsible for the biosynthesis of the endocannabinoid 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG) in the brain and peripheral tissues. Selective DAGLβ inhibitors have been proposed as a potential treatment for inflammatory diseases with reduced potential for central…

Chemotherapy that does not harm the body, but effectively fights cancer cells: that is the goal of chemist Sylvestre Bonnet and his team. During his PhD research, chemist Xuequan Zhou brought that goal a little closer. He developed molecules that, upon injection in the bloodstream, self-assemble into…

Discovery and development of Central Nervous System (CNS) drugs is hampered by high attrition rates.

Cell biologist Erik Danen has been awarderd a grant of half a million euros to study how tumor cells spread throughout the body en develop drug resistance. This was announced mid-August by the Dutch Cancer Society Fund (KWF).

Promotor: Prof.dr. M. Danhof, Co-Promotor: J. de Jongh

Leiden PhD student Xuequan Zhou has designed a new promising molecule that efficiently kills cancer cells, but does not harm healthy tissue. The trick: the drug is only active when irradiated with light. Zhou’s new compound does this extra efficiently by cleverly self-organising into nanoparticles.…

Benjamin Fogarty-Valenzuela published the article 'Pedagogies of Prohibition: Time, Education, and the War on Drugs in Rio de Janeiro’s Zona Norte' in Cultural Anthropology 37. The article’s three sections focus on three forms of temporal control—busyness, punctuality, and rhythm—and each demonstrates…

How can the combination of sound composition, astrochemistry, and epistemological analysis provide new and unexpected insights into interstellar chemical reactivity?

The lack of success of new CNS drugs in clinical development is in part due to the complexity of the CNS, unexpected side effects, difficulties for drugs to penetrate the brain, but also by the lack of biomarkers.

Do understudied animals contain hidden species?

Prostate cancer (PCa) is one of the most prevalent cancer in males.

This thesis represents a comprehensive investigation into the control of cancer stemness and metastatic initiation using a combination of advanced zebrafish xenograft models and in vitro assays.

Discovering effective new drugs is a long, expensive and uncertain process. Laura Heitman wants to improve this by finding out more about how drugs bind to proteins that play a role in disease. She calls it ‘drug discovery 3.0’. Inaugural lecture on 9 December.

The immune system plays a paradoxical role in the spread of breast cancer. Some immune cells contribute to metastasis, while other cells can be activated to strengthen the effect of chemotherapy. Kelly Kersten made this discovery in her PhD research. PhD defence 7 February.

Although rarely considered by the pharmaceutical industry or clinicians, 24-hour rhythms in physiology are a factor of potential influence on the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of drugs.

The investigations described in this thesis lay out strategies aimed at advancing antibiotic research and development. The examples presented revolve around two main approaches: understanding drug-target interactions and target identification.

Liposomes hold great promise for peptide-based personalized cancer vaccination, especially when administered intradermally. However, current liposome preparation methods are very time consuming (resulting in long development times per formulation), whereas personalized cancer vaccination requires very…

Glycosidases are important enzymes in the turnover of polysaccharides and glycoconjugates, and are involved in a range of human pathologies including genetic disorders such as Gaucher and Pompe disease, but also in various cancers.

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…

Another research line is the development of a spatial CNS drug distribution model, by ultimately including the 3-dimensional anatomical organization of the CNS.

This project is funded by the Dutch Cancer Society. The project will be part of an ongoing research line aimed at identifying mechanisms of cancer therapy resistance and metastasis. In this project, it will be investigated how the Grainyhead family of transcription factors controls therapy response…

In breast cancer, metastasis rather than the primary tumour is the cause of death. A lack of oxygen in the tumour cells promotes this metastasis, accompanied by a reprogramming of the cell's metabolism. PhD candidate Qiuyu Liu investigated these alterations to get more knowledge about the actionable…

Since the start of the Green Office, several projects have been initiated to increase awareness amongst staff & students and to make the university more sustainable. Read all about our current projects here.

This thesis investigates how non-genetic factors, such as inflammation and concomitant medication, impact hepatic drug metabolism and subsequent drug metabolizing phenotype predictions.

Promotor: B. vd Water, T. Schmidt, Co-Promotor: E.H.J. Danen

Robert Ietswaart does research into gene regulation at the famous Harvard Medical School in Boston. He developed an algorithm to better predict whether a candidate medicine is going to produce side effects. He studied mathematics and physics in Leiden, and gained his PhD in computational biology in…