NVGCT

And the moment arrived, the group that wins the ZonMw Early Career Challenge is.... Group 3! Tessa Prins (ExoVectory), Federico Cocozza (Utrecht University) and Despoina Trasanidou (Sanquin)! Congratulations!!! #ZonMw #ExoVectory #Sanquin @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social

LNPs that are potent in vitro but often not in vivo, therefore it is necessary to optimize in order to have a functional platform for drug delivery and clinical translation. Important! tiny changes in the lipid molecules of LNPs can result in a 1000-fold higher delivery! #NVGCT2025

Our second Keynote is Prof. Raimond Schiffelers from the University of Utrecht (@utrechtuniversity.bsky.social). He will delivered a talk on Optimizing Lipid Nanoparticles for Nucleic Acids Delivery. #NVGCT2025 #LNPs #nanoparticles

Next in line is a selected abstract by Peiyu Li from the #Amsterdamumc ( @amsterdamumc.bsky.social ) who will be presenting on the use of airway organoids to evaluate gene silencing in the patient context. #NVGCT2025

Next Session is on Cellular platforms and we start with Nicola Fattorelli from VIB-UAntwerpen, and he is talking about human microglia xenografts to model disease and develop cell therapies. #NVGCT2025

We reach the Diamond Sponsor presentation. NecstGen is a non-profit organization aiming to reduce the costs of gene and cell therapy. In this presentation Diederik Lokhorst from #Viralvector is guiding us on how to do the experimental design for different factors using #lentivirus

Last pitch comes from Tessa Prins (ExoVectory), Federico Cocozza (Utrecht University) and Despoina Trasanidou (Sanquin) who combine their expertise and passion into one project. The final winner will be announced at the end of the meeting! Congratulations to all the participants!! #NVGCT2025 #ZonMw

Next in line are Stefan Kint and Grigory Kornienko from #Exovectory and #Amsterdamumc @amsterdamumc.bsky.social, respectively

The time has come... 3 groups are pitching for the ZonMw Early Career Challenge Award...
First in line are Peiyu Li from #VUMC and Yue Chen from #AMC @amsterdamumc.bsky.social

Every year the NVGCT awards the Greiner award for the best thesis conducted in the Netherlands on gene or cell therapy field. This year the winner is Qiang Wang from #LUMC who did the thesis in the group of Dr. Manuel Gonçalves. We would like to thank #Greiner for their continuous support!

This work highlights how a therapy was developed in 8 months! This poses chances for a platform for n-of-1 studies, however the conventional drug development is way longer, at least in the EU. Can this be sped up?

the last presentation of this session is given by Stijn van Breda Vriesman from @umcutrecht.bsky.social who will be talking about the regulatory perspective for gene editing. He will be talking about the recently breakthrough paper on personalized based editing work: www.nejm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

The next speaker is Karin Pike-Overzet from #LUMC who will be talking about a clinical trial for RAG1-SCID patients using hematopoietic stem-cell therapy combined with lentiviral therapy. #SCID #NVGCT2025 #clinicaltrial #RAG1

The next speaker is selected from the submitted abstracts and is Deja Porenta who is working on assessing the Cas9-directed immune response in mice at the @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social #NVGCT2025 #LNPs #Cas9 #nanoparticles

The next session is on Genetic Technologies, and the first speaker is Prof. Sabine Fuchs (from @umcutrecht.bsky.social). She will talk about prime editing for inherited metabolic diseases. #NVGCT2025 #metabolicdiseases #primeediting #liver

To end, he give the look to the future. Once again, congratulations to Prof. Vincenzo Cerullo for receiving this NVGCT award for his contribution to the field! #NVGCT2025 #award #oncolyticvirus #peptides #cancer

for that a peptichip was created as otherwise many cells were needed. Still after finding the peptides they need to be tested for immunogenicity

while generating a batch of virus is very expensive. So in that sense having a regular virus decorated with peptides decreases the price. But how to find these peptides?

Other examples are PeptiENV (using again oncolytic viruses) or PeptiBAC (using Bacteria) modified with the peptides. By combining peptides with the virus or bacteria you can make the product cheaper because generating the peptide to decorate the virus is very cheap and controlled

So basically an oncolytic virus has become an anti-tummor vaccine, steering the Ferrari in the desired direction. The delivery also was improved to deliver subcutaneously and intratumoral, developing a stronger response. The results of the clinical trial will be presented at the #ESGCT 2025

Oncolytic viruses are good vehicles but need improvements. Prof. Cerullo has been guiding us on how to built these viruses by comparing them to a Ferrari. But how he did that? For example by anchoring a tumor-specific peptide, which led to PeptiCRAd (currently in clinical trials).

However, before starting his presentations he had a clear message to the quizzmasters of the famous NVGCT pubquiz "Ricotta is a fantastic cheese but is not included in Lasagna or Pasta Alfredo" Statement from an Italian-dominated team #NVGCT2025

This year the the NVGCT Outstanding Award is awarded to Prof. Vincenzo Cerullo, who has been working on precision cancer oncolytic immunotherapy and will provide a presentation "Dressing up viruses to fool cancer: fast pipeline for personalized cancer vaccines" #NVGCT2025 #award #oncolyticvirus

We are back for the second day of our Annual Meeting. This year 22 early career researchers participated in the ZonMw challenge. 10 of them found a match and 3 groups managed to submit a proposal. Later today they will participate in the final round. Good luck to all of them!

@olivier-de-jong.bsky.social

The last presentation of this session and today is given by Olivier de Jong (@utrechtuniversity.bsky.social) on delivery and release strategies for CRISPR/Cas9 system using extracellular vesicles #EVs #NVGCT2025 #CRISPR

It is great to see so many AAV-based approaches with market approval! #NVGCT2025

We have the honor of having today Prof. Ahad Rahid from @ucl.ac.uk who is talking about Gene Therapy for Lysosomal Disorders. Special thanks for the effort to join today given the current situation with trains in the Netherlands. In particular he will talk about Niemann-Pick type C gene therapy.

The next session on delivery started with the invited lecture of Roy van der Meel (@tue.nl) to talk on nanotechnology for delivery of RNA, small molecules, protein to immune cells by systemic delivery using #LNPs #NVGCT2025

the last speaker of this session is Martina Paladino from @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social and she will explain her postdoc project on the lipid nanoparticles delivery to induce dopaminergic neurons both in vitro and in vivo #NVGCT2025 #LNPs #nanoparticles #neurons