With ever more people living in cities worldwide, it becomes increasingly important to understand the positive and negative impacts of the urban habitat on livability, health behaviors and health outcomes. However, implementing interventions that tackle health in complex urban systems can be costly and have long-term, sometimes unforeseen and indirect, impacts. Hence, it is crucial to not only assess the health impact of interventions, but also its cost-effectiveness and the social distributional impacts of possible urban exposome interventions before implementing them.

Play is fun, and we recognize play when we see it. But play is also important for healthy social, emotional and cognitive development. Play allows children (and animals) to experiment with their behavioural repertoire, with social interactions and to learn from challenges they face. We know a lot about play and the importance of play from research with rodents. Research in rats has shown that not being able to play affects the development of brain and behaviour in the social, emotional and cognitive domain. What are the implications for children who are limited in their opportunities to play? Could play be a key to preventive health?

This presentation offers a concise overview of how to study consumer behavior and use behavioral interventions to encourage healthier and more sustainable consumption habits. We’ll start by understanding the factors that influence consumer choices, which are not only rational but also deeply affected by unconscious and emotional elements. Through examples from our research, I’ll outline the essential requirements for effective behavioural interventions, offering key insights into what works and what doesn’t. This talk aims to give you practical tips on fostering sustainable consumer habits through targeted behavioral strategies.

Nucleic acid therapeutics are revolutionizing healthcare via gene inhibition, addition, replacement or editing. However, nucleic acid-based drugs require chemical modifications and sophisticated nanotechnology to prevent their degradation, reduce immunostimulatory effects, and ensure intracellular delivery. Lipid nanoparticle (LNP) technology is the current gold standard platform that enabled the clinical translation of the first siRNA drug Onpattro and the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. Nevertheless, current LNP systems are mostly suited for vaccine purposes following local administration or hepatic delivery following intravenous administration. To unleash RNA’s full therapeutic and prevention potential, I will introduce modular nanoplatform technology for systemic nucleic acid delivery to immune cells in hematopoietic organs using apolipoproteins.

Glycans from our diet and gut mucin have an impact on the microbial ecologic interactions in the human gut. It is a challenge to unravel the metabolic interactions and trophic roles of the highly complex and individual gut microbiomes. Synthetic minimal gut microbiomes are used as a tool to investigate key microbes in microbial cross-feeding and syntrophic interactions that lead to the degradation of mucin and dietary glycans. In my group we designed synthetic gut microbiomes to study adult (MDb-MM), infant (BIGSyC) and mucosal (PMDs), microbial ecologic and metabolic interactions. Our communities range from 6-16 bacterial species covering all trophic niches and cross-feeding potential within the gut environment of interest. Overall, our work provides crucial insights into the co-existence, metabolic niches and trophic roles of key intestinal microbes in a highly dynamic and competitive in vitro ecosystem. As such we provide a model to test the effect of dietary or other changes on the gut microbiome ecologic structure and functionality and a possible alternative to fecal microbiota transplantation.

Extracellular Vesicles (EVs) are nanometer-sized vesicles secreted by virtually every cell type in our body. By shuttling specific cargo-molecules from one cell to another, they establish intercellular communication pathways able to reprogram recipient cells. As such, EVs are implicated as essential mediators in physiology and pathology. Yet, due to their miniscule size, much of how they behave in real life remains obscure. To unravel these EV-communication pathways and use this knowledge to our advantage, we use molecular tools to visualize and modulate these biological information flows in living model organisms. 

Patient derived cellular disease models have great potential for developing new therapeutics and study biology since they closely represent the human biology. However these system are highly heterogeneous and vast amount of experiments and data are required to get useful insights. During this talk we will show how the use of state-of-the-art automated laboratory set-ups for experimental standardization and Artificial Intelligence in analysis pipelines can speed-up and standardize this process.