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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

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

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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

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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

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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

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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!

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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...

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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!

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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

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.

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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

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Our next speaker is Anne-Lot van Esbroeck from the @erasmusmc.bsky.social who is going to present on the development of #antisense therapies for brain diseases. In particular Rare Diseases, which the rarity of the disorders complicates significantly the chances of a treatment.

After the fantastic keynote lecture of Prof. Heine, we move forward to the next session on therapy development for neurological disorders. The first speaker is Cora Nijboer from @umcutrecht.bsky.social who will present on intranasal stem cell therapy for brain injury for newborns.

After the networking lunch, we are welcoming our first keynote speker: Prof. Vivi Heine from @amsterdamumc.bsky.social who will be talking about the use of iPSC models for modeling disease and assess therapeutics

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Every year #ZonMw sponsors the early career challenge, where early career researches match their expertise to create a feasible project. We heard how Athina Mavoproulo and Alba Montoro Canelo use the prize in research, attend the #ESGCT2024 and how their careers are at the moment.

We had the honor to have Cees Smit who presented his book "Gene and Cell Therapies in Europe". This book describes the breakthroughs in ATMPs, offering real prospects of cures. #NVGCT2025

We could not have our annual symposium without the support of our sponsors. We are hearing pitches of how their products can help our research. A big big thanks to all of them for their continuous support. @biomerieux.com @cytiva.bsky.social

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To finish the #DARE-NL session, Trudy Straetemans is back on stage to present how DARE-NL can help us preparing and accelerating a first in-human clinical study. #NVGCT2025

Next, Harry Dolstra (from @radboudumc.bsky.social) is presenting the work of his group on developing #CAR-NK for clinical application. Using umbilical cord stem cells they can develop NK cells in 35 days in a GMP-compliant scalable manufacturing process. #NVGCT2025

Edwin Bremer (from @rug.nl) presented how to develop a lentiviral manufacturing platform at academic level in the Netherlands, to provide therapies at the lowest price possible. For that they are developing a GMP-compliant freedom-to-operate manufacturing process. #NVGCT2025

The NVGCT Annual Meeting 2025 kicks off with a session organized by DARE-NL in which we will learn on how to accelerate clinical testing of novel ATMPs to ensure timely and sustainable access.Trudy Straetemans (@umcutrecht.bsky.social) provided an introduction to #DARE-NL #NVGCT2025