On 23 June 2022, we put the spotlight on ourselves at our 5th Annual Symposium. It was great to see the contributions of our own members. During the day, PhD students, postdocs, and program leaders presented the research being carried out at our institute and added a creative touch to the symposium by sharing lab videos to promote their lab. After the scientific program, the vocals of our members were called upon, which resulted in an impressive 3-voice harmony song. The evening program featured a great dance party with DJ Alex.

Abstracts

PhD students and postdocs were invited to submit an abstract prior to the symposium. We received numerous interesting abstracts and it was a great challenge for our jury to select the best three abstracts for presentation in the plenary session, followed by the four best abstracts per program for presentations in the parallel sessions.

You can find all submitted abstracts on this page.

The winners of the plenary session, with a prize worth 200 euros, were:

Myrthe van Delft from the Inflammatory Diseases program with her abstract tiled: Blocking FcαR1 (CD89)/IgA interaction using CD89 specific antibodies is a potential therapeutic target to resolve tissue damage in chronic inflammation and autoimmunity.

Melissa van Gool from the Infectious Diseases program with her abstract titled: Spitting image: targeting tick saliva proteins by vaccination as a novel strategy to prevent Lyme borreliosis.

Else Huijbers from the Cancer Immunology program with her abstract titled: A novel cancer immunotherapy; vaccination against tumor vascular extracellular vimentin.

The best presentation of each parallel session was chosen by the audience and won a prize worth 200 euros. Please congratulate:

Marten Hoeksema from the Inflammatory Diseases program with his abstract titled: Mechanisms underlying divergent responses of genetically distinct macrophages to IL-4.

Alexis Burnham from the Infectious Diseases program with her abstract titled: Designing a cocktail vaccine against Lyme borreliosis combining tick- and Borrelia-derived antigens.

Tamara Verkerk from the Cancer Immunology program with her abstract titled: Expression of neolacto-series glycosphingolipids by tumors impairs anti-tumor responses by immune cells.

Promote your lab/dept video

For the creative part of the symposium we asked research groups to submit a ‘promote your lab/dept’ video to be shown at the symposium. The public voted for the best video and the winning research group received a lab dinner voucher worth 1,000 Euros. The winning lab is:

Lab van Egmond