NWO Graduate Programme

Future medicines: advanced affordable biomolecular and cellular therapies

As of September 2016 we will start the Graduate Programme, supported by NWO. The aim is to create a cohort of PhD candidates, to promote the advanced affordable biomolecular and cellular therapies, and to strengthen our UIPS community. We want to stimulate master students to write their own PhD research proposal and to interact with as many research groups as possible through rotation. An example of Future medicines can be found in this movie, focusing on delivery of genes.

Future Medicines Fellows
Photo by Bas van Breukelen

A focus group of  PhD students with an interest in biopharmaceuticals,cell and gene therapy, the Future Medicines Fellows, is selected and allowed to participate in the Principal Investigator (PI) rotation. The same group will manage and organize the meetings and topics of the Future Medicines Lecture Series, as well as a Future Medicines Summer School, which is open to all. We foresee that our future medicines will be advanced biomolecular and cellular therapies. These biopharmaceuticals can be proteins, nucleic acids, carbohydrates, lipids and even cells. The ultimate aim is to offer personalised or precision medicine. More and more drugs will be registered with a companion diagnostic. Affordability is another scientific challenge in precision medicine.