Fungal infections pose a significant threat to individuals with compromised immune systems and despite advancements in diagnosis and treatment, they continue to jeopardize patient’s health.

Promotores: B. van de Water; P. Hogendoorn; J. Bovée Co-Promotor: E.H.J. Danen

After graduation you have a lot of opportunities: academics are highly sought after in Dutch secondary education or mbo teaching. You can also aim for a management position or work as a researcher within the field of Life Sciences.

Supervisor: Gerard van Westen

Chemical-induced organ toxicity is a major concern in the development and use of chemicals, including drugs, pesticides, industrial chemicals and cosmetics. In the last decades, the onset and progression of chemical-induced organ toxicity has been linked amongst others to perturbation of mitochondri…

The Division of Systems Pharmacology and Pharmacy (SPP) aims to develop precision medicine approaches to characterize and predict variation in treatment response and enhance translational drug development strategies.

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Cell adhesion signaling

Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is one of the main reasons for drug attrition during pre-clinical and clinical phases of drug development as well as for drug withdrawal post-marketing.

To improve treatment of breast cancer patients it is important to understand all stages of breast cancer from initiation to in situ disease and progression to invasive disease. In this thesis we use intraductal injections of patient derived tissue to model ductal carcinoma in situ and invasive breast…

A Dutch consortium has received €6.7 million to accelerate the development of nanomedicines together with patients. Researchers from Leiden University play a key role in the project.

Molecular Physiology is a research group at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry dedicated to the design, synthesis and application of chemical tools to study important biological and biomedical questions. The group is headed by Prof. Dr. Mario van der Stelt and includes the research lines of Assistant…

This is an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility project of Leiden University’s Faculty of Science with University of California.

Supervisor: Gerard van Westen

kiem grant: Investigating the anti-inflammatory potential of the PRG4 protein in preventing and alleviating rheumatoid arthritis

The Novel chemical modalities research group is headed by Assistant Professor Sebastian Pomplun. Sebastian started at the division of Medicinal Chemistry within the LACDR in September 2021. His lab develops technologies for the discovery of novel chemical modalities that can address challenging drug…

Accurate prediction of the unbound drug concentration-time profile at the CNS target site is crucial for the assessment of the right drug concentration-effect relationship. PBPK models have supported the PK prediction of the CNS target sites and the translation of PK data between species and between…

Steffen Brünle's group investigates G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). These essential membrane proteins are prime targets for therapeutic drug development in disease and cancer treatment.

In this PhD thesis, available data on the PK and/or PD of different targeted therapies, chemotherapy and immunotherapies obtained during both routine clinical practice and prospective clinical studies were analyzed.

Three Leiden researchers have been awarded a Vici grant by the Dutch Research Council. The funding of up to 1.5 million euros supports ‘talented, adventurous and pioneering researchers’. A total of 39 projects at Dutch institutions will receive a grant.

Professor Thomas Hankemeier and his international research team HYPERMARKER have received a 10m-euro grant from Horizon Europe and UK Research and Innovation.

In April, the X-omics initiative was granted 17 million euros from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research. The subsidy is part of the National Roadmap for large-scale scientific infrastructure, intended to build or renew large-scale research facilities. What new insights will this investment…

LED3 is the combined effort of four excellent institutes of Leiden University. Through joined hands, we are able to give rise to a more effective early drug discovery pipeline. Let us briefly introduce the institutes.

PhD defence

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

While bioinformatics methods deal with the analysis of sequence information (be it proteins or DNA), the field of cheminformatics is concerned with the analysis of small-molecule datasets.

The discovery of new medicines is a tedious and lengthy process. On average, over 10,000 molecules need to be studied for one to become a drug and reach the patient. Part of that process are the very costly clinical trials in humans, and candidate drugs often fail due to side effects or lack of efficacy.…

A combination of two potential drugs gives hope of a 'super blockage' of an over-active immune system, Leiden researchers report in Nature. The breakthrough came from the crystallisation of a membrane protein.

Supervisor: Xue Yang

About nine million people worldwide contract tuberculosis each year. Research into new treatment for this disease has received fresh stimulus with more efficient techniques and a new understanding of how the tuberculosis bacteria works.

We aim to gain a better understanding of the natural disease progression of ALS in order to improve clinical trial design and analysis and to support drug discovery and clinical development of new drugs.

Particles are omnipresent in biopharmaceutical products. In protein-based therapeutics such particles are generally associated with impurities, either derived from the drug product itself (e.g. protein aggregates), or from extrinsic contaminations (e.g. cellulose fibers).

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide. Metastasis, the process by which cancer cells spread to other parts of the body, makes treatments less effective. It is important to unravel the mechanism of metastasis.

Growth and development affect the metabolism of drugs administered to neonates, infants, and children.

Our research aims to develop drugs that boost the host immune response to better defend us against mycobacteria.

Source: Eur J Med Chem, Volume 101, pp. 681-91 (2015)

The division of BioTherapeutics consists of the former divisions Biopharmaceutics and Drug Delivery Technology.

Inactivating mutations in BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes predispose to several types of cancer.

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

Promotor: B. van de Water, Co-Promotores: J.H.N. Meerman, F.J. Verbeek

Atherosclerosis is a progressive disease resulting in the formation of an arterial plaque. Despite lipid lowering, recurrent cardiovascular events remain a risk. While atherosclerosis is primarily lipid-driven, the immune system plays a critical role in the pathophysiology.

Source: British Journal of Dermatology, Volume 170, Number 6, pp. E18-E19 (2014) ISBN:0007-0963

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…

Source: Journal of Investigative Dermatology, Volume 135, pp. S59-S59 (2015)

The outermost layer of the skin, the stratum corneum (SC), is responsible for the skin barrier function, protecting the body from pathogens, chemicals and other unwanted substances from the external environment. The SC lipid matrix provides the only continuous pathway through the SC and is considered…

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), the pathogen causing tuberculosis (TB), is the leader among all pathogens responsible for the most human deaths today and it is considered as one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide. There is an increasing occurrence of multidrug-resistant and even totally drug-resistant…

Bispecific antibodies with one Fab arm binding to effector cells, such as T-cells and NK-cells, while the other Fab arm recognizing a tumor associated antigen (TAA) can be used to redirect these effector cells for tumor specific killing. Using bispecific antibodies to treat hematological cancers is…