One day of cutting-edge in vitro models
Registrations are now closed.
Date and time: January 10th 2025, from 9:00-18:00 
Location: Boothzaal, University Library Utrecht Science Park
Includes lunch, refreshments and borrel.
The quest to cross the human blood-brain barrier (BBB) remains one of the most critical challenges we face in neuroscience and medicine today. Scientists work tirelessly from both sides of the issue: from the side of the brain, and from the side of the vasculature to develop compounds and techniques for crossing. In recent years, a number of new human in vitro modeling technologies have greatly aided these endeavors, specifically new brain organoids and BBB models.
This is why on January 10th, 2025, we bring you the CONNECT Symposium: a one-day program around recent advances in bioengineering, in vitro BBB modeling and brain organoids. The day will bring together scientists, students, and industry leaders who are interested in or actively developing such models.
We unite over two questions: How can we create the most advanced in vitro BBB and brain organoid models? And what becomes possible when we develop models connecting the two?
The CONNECT Symposium provides a platform for established and junior scientists from academia and private industry to share their latest discoveries, challenges, and perspectives. The program will feature scientists from around the country.
Our keynote speakers of the day are Dr. Adrian Ranga (KU Leuven, BE) and Dr. Roberto Villaseñor (Roche, CH). Dr. Ranga will share methods for vascularizing cerebral organoids. Dr. Villaseñor will share techniques to generate high throughput in vitro models of the BBB.
Don’t miss this opportunity to be at the forefront of brain organoid and BBB model research. Sign up and submit your registration fee here.
See below for the schedule and info on our keynote speakers!
Schedule
Keynote Speakers
Dr. Adrian Ranga | KU Leuven (BE)
Adrian Ranga is Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at KU Leuven. His research explores principles of development using engineered biomimetic model systems. Prior to joining KU Leuven, he obtained a B.Eng and M.Eng from McGill University, a PhD from EPFL, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School. The Ranga lab focuses on the development of bioengineering approaches to generate in-vitro organoid models, and in understanding the role of mechanical forces and vasculature in specifying organoid fate, patterning, growth and morphogenesis. Ranga is an Allen Distinguished Investigator, whose lab has pioneered actuation and perfusion technologies, and is now developing the next generation of engineered neural organoids and associated disease models.
Dr. Ranga on his keynote talk:
Cerebral organoids’ lack of intrinsic vascularization poses a major challenge to their ability to model elements of embryonic development, brain disease, and drug uptake across the BBB. Specifically, most current organoid vascularization strategies do not recapitulate the temporal synchronization and spatial orientation needed to ensure in vivo-like early co-development, and are thereby limited in scale and function. In this talk I will describe the development process of our microfluidic chip models. In these models, large-scale iPSC-derived brain tissues are perfused via fully synthetic vasculature, and an iPSC-derived cerebral organoid become vascularized through co-development with a self-organizing vascular network of iPSC-derived pericytes and endothelial cells.
Dr. Roberto Villaseñor | Roche (CH)
Roberto Villaseñor heads the Brain Delivery lab in the Neuroscience department at Roche. He leads the preclinical efforts to develop next-generation technologies to deliver therapeutic antibodies to the brain. In this role, he has successfully developed in vitro human blood-brain barrier models to accelerate the profiling of novel compounds and gain a better mechanistic understanding of the impact of disease on transport to the brain. Roberto obtained his PhD in Dresden at the Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology and genetics and has a track record of applying novel methodologies to better understand blood-brain barrier transport.
Dr. Villaseñor on his keynote talk:
Receptor-mediated transcytosis (RMT) across the blood-brain barrier has been recently validated as an effective pathway to deliver therapeutic antibodies to the brain. Optimization of brain delivery technologies requires scalable and robust in vitro human systems that recapitulate the mechanisms of RMT. In this talk I will summarize our efforts to develop robust fit-for purpose BBB models to accelerate development of next-generation BrainshuttlesTM.
The CONNECT Symposium is an initiative of the CONNECT Research Consortium*, headed by Prof. Dr. Elly Hol (UMC Utrecht) and Prof. Dr. Elga de Vries (Amsterdam UMC), and funded by NWO, Hersenstichting and Proefdiervrij.
*The CONNECT Consortium is a five-year collaborative project to develop a chip connecting a brain organoid to an in vitro blood-brain barrier. Kindly funded by NWO, Hersenstichting and Proefdiervrij, our consortium partners include UMC Utrecht, Amsterdam UMC, Danone/Nutricia, Pimbio, Eyesiu, InnoSer, Confocal, SGF, and BG.legal.