NWO VENI grant for Paulina to build advanced liver models
- rlevato
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Today, the Dutch Research Council announced the awardees of this year's VENI Talent program. The lab is happy to share the fantastic news that Paulina received the grant, to kick-off a new research project on liver tissue bioprinting and modelling.
Huge Congrats, Paulina for this very well deserved recognition!
Many new medicines fail or cause serious side effects because current laboratory models cannot fully mimic how human organs work. The liver is especially important in drug safety testing, because it processes medicines and helps remove waste products from the body. One key process is the production and transport of bile, a fluid that supports detoxification and digestion and depends on close cooperation between different liver cell types.
With the project BiLVR - Developmentally Instructive Biofabrication to Program Multicellular Transport Pathways in the Human Liver, Paulina Núñez Bernal will develop a new way to build human liver tissue using advanced 3D bioprinting. Instead of only printing cells into a predefined shape, she will introduce biological instructions into printed biomaterials. In the body, tissues are not formed by simply placing cells in the right position; cells are constantly guided by signals from their surroundings. BiLIVR aims to bring this layer of dynamic, biological instruction into 3D bioprinted liver models, helping them better mimic human tissue function for drug safety testing.
The long-term aim is to create more human-relevant models that help researchers better understand how medicines affect the liver and better predict the toxicity of drugs. This will reduce reliance on animal experiments.
The Veni grants are established by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to provide creative space for adventurous, talented, pioneering researchers to develop their own line of research and further develop their talent. For this year's round, NWO has awarded Veni funding of up to 320,000 euro to 205 promising researchers, of which 29 from Utrecht University, from the full breadth of science. This will allow the laureates to further develop their own research ideas over the next three years.
Read more about the grant and find out all the awarded project:
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