In August, Cellectricon welcomed our new coworker Lydia Moll. Lydia will carry out her PhD project at the company over the next four years. The project is part of BonePain II, a European Innovative Training Network committed to promote 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 19-20 at the Royal Veterinary College in London (UK).
Lydia received her bachelor’s degree in Molecular and Technical Medicine from Furtwangen University (Germany) and graduated with an MSc in Cell and Tissue Engineering at Keele University (UK). Her research projects focused on musculoskeletal diseases and stem cell differentiation. For example, she worked on the establishment of an intervertebral disc organ culture model as well as the evaluation of hydrogel environments on the cartilaginous differentiation of pluripotent stem cells.
During her PhD project at Cellectricon Lydia will work to develop “disease in a dish” microfluidic co-culture models to study bone and neuronal cell interactions and their possible contributions to bone pain. A special focus will be on antibody-driven pain in arthritis, the mechanisms, and possible treatment options for arthritis. The project will also include secondments in the molecular pain research group of Professor Camilla Svensson at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm (Sweden) with the ambition to translate the in vitro findings to the in vivo setting.
BonePain II training network
The first annual meeting of the BonePain II network at the Royal Veterinary University in London (UK) brought together the Marie-Curie fellowship PhD students, recruited from all over the world, as well as their supervisors and industrial collaborators. The meeting gave the participants opportunity to present their research topic, exchanging knowledge, and building networks for the future. The conference program was completed by courses in animal pain measurement and workshops for cross-cultural management skills. The Cellectricon team is looking forward to welcoming students from Copenhagen, Stockholm, Porto, and Utrecht for secondments at Cellectricon during the next years, and the opportunity to give them insights in how to apply our technologies in chronic pain research as well as experience from research in an industrial setting.