2019

Alessio Buccino from University of Oslo, Norway, was awarded an ETH Zurich Postdoctoral Fellowship (CHF 230'000) and will join our group in March 2020.

New National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) "AntiResist" includes University and Hospital in Basel and ETH groups (Department of Biology and D-​BSSE). The aim of this NCCR is to find new antibiotics and develop strategies to combat antibiotics-​resistant bacteria.

Felix Franke received an Eccelenza Professorial Fellowship for 5 years from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Eccellenza Grants are for highly qualified young researchers to build an independent group.  

Our activities in the area of neurons on microelectronic chips presented to a broad audience in the framework of a public tour to our laboratory including a presentation and lab visits.

Alumni and coworkers of BEL and PEL (former group of Prof. Henry Baltes) met for a day to talk about hot topics in science and industry.  

BEL group co-organizes 23rd International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences (MicroTAS 2019) from 27 - 31 October, 2019 in the congress center Basel.

International delegation from Southeast University, Nanjing, China, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Center for Advancing Translational Science at the US National Institutes of Health visited BEL to discuss organ-on-chip technologies.  

2019 IQ Consortium and AAALAC Intemational Global 3Rs Award for region Europe to Julia Boos and coworkers for their paper "Microfluidic multitissue platform for advanced embryotoxicity testing in vitro".

Review article titled "Integrated microphysiological systems: Transferable organ models and recirculating flow" was selected for inclusion into Editors' Choice collection of the journal Advanced Biosystems.

New postdoc in our group, working on information processing in neuronal networks, Sreedhar S. Kumar, was interviewed for the News page of the Department BSSE.  

BEL spinoff, MaxWell Biosystems AG, founded 2016, reached rank 33 in the Swiss Top 100 Startup Competition 2019. MaxWell was on rank 7 among the Biotech companies.

ERC proof-of-concept grant application titled "HD-MEA-based Neuronal Assays and Network Analysis for Phenotypic Drug Screenings" (HD-Neu-Screen) was retained for funding.

Embryonic cells and liver cells have been combined in a new cell culture test. This combination enables to detect adverse effects that new drugs may have on embryos early on in the drug development process as detailed in a recent reaserch article in Advanced Science.

Together with Verdon Taylor (University of Basel), Manuel Schröter initiated a project to study the physiology and degeneration of human dopaminergic neurons in Parkinson’s disease.