News
The American Chemical Society has honoured Albert Heck with the ‘ACS Frank H. Field and Joe L. Franklin Award for Outstanding Achievements in Mass Spectrometry’. Heck receives the award for his development of new methods and techniques to identify and study the structure and function of proteins and protein complexes.
In the field of Chemistry, the American Chemical Society Awards are considered to be very prestigious, and are almost exclusively presented to researchers from America. The Award will be presented during the meetings of the American Chemical Society in March 2016.
ICI researchers at the Netherlands Cancer Institute have discovered three new resistance mechanisms of cancer cells against the commonly used anti-cancer drugs doxorubicin and etoposide. In The Netherlands alone, thousands of patients a year are treated with one of these drugs. But they don't always work well for every patient. The new discovery might help predict whether a patient will or will not benefit from them.
Hermen Overkleeft (Leiden Institute of Chemistry, University Leiden) has been awarded the Jeremy Knowles Award 2015 for his innovative and insightful development of activity-based protein probes for the imaging and identification of enzymes in health and disease. The award of the Royal Society of Chemistry is to recognise and promote the importance of inter- and multidisciplinary research between chemistry and the life sciences.
Sjaak Neefjes, scientific director of the ICI, has been selected as one of 16 new Academy members.
Prof. Sjaak Neefjes is an internationally leading researcher in the field of cellular immunology. He investigates how cells control the immune system and how they flag up infection. He invented new techniques to visualise and manipulate reactions within cells, through which he is able to follow processes in healthy and diseased cells. He has been praised for his originality and multidisciplinary approach, and many of his inventions have already led to clinical applications.
T-Cell Factory, a Netherlands-based company specialising in the discovery, characterisation and selection of therapeutically promising T-cell receptors (TCR) will continue its activities as part of US-based Kite Pharma. TCRs have the potential to activate T-cells (the ‘killer’ cells of the body's immune system) with high specificity against tumor cells. One of the founders of T-Cell Factory is Prof. Dr. Ton Schumacher of the Netherlands Cancer Institute, who is also on the ICI Executive Board.
On Friday March 6, 2015, the first Chemical Immunology Conference of the Institute for Chemical Immunology took place in the Rode Hoed in Amsterdam.
Is it possible for sugar patterns on cells to activate the immune system to combat cancer? ICI scientist Sander van Kasteren of Leiden University is using his grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to discover whether this is possible.
The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) has awarded Celia Berkers of the Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research at Utrecht University, the Netherlands with the 2014 Heineken Young Scientists Award for Biochemistry and Biophysics for her research into the workings of the proteasome, a structure that breaks down proteins in biological cells.
Professors Hermen Overkleeft en Hans Aerts of Leiden University have received an NWO TOP-PUNT grant of 2 million euro, together with their colleague Huib ovaa of the Netherlands Cancer Institute. The research is aimed at developing novel therapies for various diseases.
Het Institute for Chemical Immunology (ICI), in which leading scientists of Dutch universities and research institutes collaborate in the fields of immunology and chemistry (chemical immunology), is awarded with a Gravitation grant of 27,6 million euro of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science of the Netherlands.