According to the LUMC, patients experience 30% fewer serious side effects when medication doses are tailored to their DNA.

PhD defence

How can Staphylococcus aureus bacteria subvert the host immune system?

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

The AiChemist project (https://aichemist.eu) coordinated by Helmholtz Munich is an Innovative Doctoral Training Network funded through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA-DN) within the EU Horizon Research Framework, to the sum of €3 million. It brings together leading experts in AI, chemoinformatics…

A tantalizing concept that has emerged in our recent research is binding kinetics. An important parameter is residence time (RT), a direct reflection of how long a drug stays bound to its target. This parameter is of crucial importance, because drug action lasts only as long as the receptor-ligand complex…

In 2020, Leiden University launched its stimulated interdisciplinary programs, including one focused on regenerative medicine.

A very large part of intravenously administered nanoparticles are cleared through the liver. Within the liver, most nanoparticles are thought to be sequestered by macrophages (Kupffer cells). To achieve effective cell-specific targeting of drugs and non-viral gene delivery vectors, improved mechanistic…

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.

This thesis aimed to investigate core cross-linked polymeric micelles (CCPMs) and expand their potential for the delivery of hydrophobic drugs and co-factors.

Research from the Living Lab is important for society. For example, scientists from the Living Lab discovered that the pesticide thiacloprid is up to 2,500 times more harmful to insects than was thought on the basis of regular lab research. Partly because of this discovery, the European Commission decided…

Research in the BioTherapeutics research programme is aimed at a smoother and speedier transition from preclinical research to pharmacological interventions, and the delivery of drugs in the human body by use of small molecules and biologics.

Promotor: Prof.dr. G.P. van Wezel

Patients share valuable advice and experiences with their peers in online patient discussion groups.

Grants awarded to molecular physiology research

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.

Antibiotics are a class of medicine most people take for granted. But pathogenic bacteria are becoming more and more resistant to our antibiotics, and this poses a great challenge for future treatments. There is thus a great societal need to identify new molecules that can address new targets and be…

How can we implement the technique of pharmacological resting-state fMRI to improve the diagnosis of dementia?

New drugs for use as tuberculosis (TB) treatment are needed due to the constrains of classical antibiotics against TB and the rise of antibiotic-resistant strains, making TB a harder and harder disease to treat.

Designing and synthesizing high-affinity ligands for a given drug target have always been among the more important challenges in the drug discovery process.

The LED3 hub, consisting of researchers from the Leiden Institute of Chemistry (LIC), the Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL) and the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR), is very excited to organize the “LED3 Lectures”. This lecture series brings world-leading researchers in the field of…

Many students receive their first job offer during or right after their Business Studies internship. After graduating you can also aim for a career in Bio-Pharmaceutical research.

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

Pharmacologist Rob van Wijk is the Highlighted Trainee Author in the October 2019 issue of the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. In his research, Van Wijk aims for a new paradigm by combining experimental work and computational data analysis.

Do you recall all those drugs that were hastily proposed as potential treatments for COVID-19? In the event of a future pandemic, the goal is to offer an effective treatment more quickly and efficiently. To achieve this, a team led by Coen van Hasselt is developing a platform that can speed up the process…

Toxys, Leiden University and Leiden University Medical Center have agreed immediately to commercialise and also develop further the ToxProfiler technology invented at the two institutions. ToxProfiler allows for rapid toxicity hazard identification of novel and existing drugs, chemicals, and other substances.…

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?

How can cell wall engineering approaches be used to improve streptomycetes for industry to make new antibiotics?

Currently, several successful vaccines are available. However, for pathogens with a highly variable genetic composition, and for which serum IgG antibodies are not a useful correlate of protection, effective vaccines are yet to be developed.

With cancer, a person’s body cells grow uncontrollably. Putting together a detailed picture of how this comes about makes it possible to develop efficient therapies. Researchers at the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) and Leiden University are working together to gain a better understanding…

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…

The two-years MSc programme spans the entire spectrum of Analytical BioSciences, Biopharmaceutics, Drug Delivery Technology, Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology and Toxicology.

Embryonic stem cells have the remarkable ability to develop into any type of cell. On their way to become for example a liver or a heart cell, they must repeatedly decide between alternative developmental paths. How they make these decisions is largely unknown. An international team of biophysicists…

Treatment with special stem cells seems to be a good option for suppressing the immune system in organ transplants. Researchers are trying to learn from processes that take place in the human body during pregnancy.

Key publications of the Quantitative Clinical Pharmacology group

The project 'Policing the high seas: maritime law-enforcement in a multi-actor environment' aims to identify the gaps in the legal framework for EU activities in the maritime security domain, and specifically in the areas of combating piracy, human smuggling or trafficking and drug trafficking.

Key publications of the Quantitative Pharmacology group

The LACDR represents the core of bio-pharmaceutical research at Leiden University, and we interact closely with our partners:

Key publications of the Predictive Pharmacology group.

Identifying the gaps in the legal framework for EU activities in the maritime security domain, and specifically in the areas of combating piracy, human smuggling or trafficking and drug trafficking.

Target selectivity is an important aspect of any drug molecule, and certainly a parameter to be optimized. That is not trivial for a number of reasons. First of all hundreds of drug targets (receptors, enzymes, ion channels) exist, and no single lab in the world has assays for all of them.

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…

Research question

Following their application to system biological models, control theory techniques have further potential to aid in the understanding and application of quantitative systems pharmacology models.

Pharmacy undergraduate education at Leiden Pharmacy combines the strong scientific foundation of the bachelor programme Bio-Pharmaceutical Sciences with experience-based learning and a strong focus on pharmaceutical patient care and pharmaceutical treatment in the master programme Pharmacy.

We aim to engineer streptomycetes to fully exploit their potential for natural product productions, by a rational design and evolution approach.

With an MSc degree in BPS and Science Communication & Society you are well prepared for a broad array of career prospects in research or industry. The master’s degree is an excellent preparation for a career at the interface of science and public affairs.

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is the deadliest common cancer, with only 8% of patients surviving for five years. One reason for this poor outcome is that current chemotherapy treatments are highly toxic, often leaving patients too sick to receive treatment or forcing doctors to lower the dose…