In September, Cellectricon welcomed our new coworker Andrea Lovincic Babic to the team. Andrea will carry out her PhD project at the company over the next four years. The project is part of BonePain III, a European doctoral network dedicated to promoting frontline research, innovation and education within bone pain. The network brings together academic and industrial partners to provide early-stage researchers with outstanding training and secondments. The network had an official kick-off on September 26-27 in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Andrea received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees Molecular Biology from the University of Zagreb (Croatia) where her research focused on the molecular mechanisms underlying Niemann-Pick disease type C. Following graduation, she worked at Cell Stress Discoveries in Galway (Ireland) where the focus was on the discovery of novel inhibitors of the Inositol-requiring enzyme 1 (IRE1). Following that, she held a position as a QC analyst at the pharmaceutical company Viatris.
During her PhD project at Cellectricon, Andrea will develop and validate novel humanized co-culture systems for the study of pain associated with bone-related disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis. Co-culture systems of native human neurons or human iPSC-derived neurons and non-neuronal cells, such as glial and bone cells, will be explored with the goal to bridge the gap between animal models and clinical studies, while keeping the capabilities suitable for industrial drug discovery. The project will also include secondments in the molecular pain research group of Professor Camilla Svensson at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm (Sweden) and the Laboratory of Translational Immunology at University Medical Center Utrecht (the Netherlands).
BonePain III training network
The BonePain III network kick-off meeting in Utrecht, the Netherlands, brought together the Marie-Curie fellowship PhD students, recruited from all over the world, as well as their supervisors and industrial collaborators. The meeting provided the group of early-stage researchers with an introduction to the network, presentations of the participating PhD projects and partners, as well as the chance to build networks for the future. The Cellectricon team is looking forward to welcoming students from Stockholm and Utrecht for secondments at Cellectricon during the next years, and the opportunity to provide them with valuable experience from pain research in an industrial setting.