University of Leiden (UL), founded in 1575, has 23.000 students and 1.900 full scientific staff. Leiden has strong international research collaborations in all scientific area’s and other strategic networks (LERU, Europeanum). About 31 % of the University’s budget is from external research funding organisations: mainly from Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and EU research programs. In FP7 Leiden university received 41 ERC Grants, was involved in 55 Marie Curie projects and participated or coordinated 81 Collaborative FP7 projects.
UL – Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research – (LACDR) is one of the research institutes within the Faculty of Science. LACDR aims to be one of the leading academic centers in the world in learning, in teaching, and in advancing innovative drug research, developing knowledge and expertise crucial for drug discovery, evaluation and (clinical) application. Safety sciences is an important component of the LACDR researh program. In the TransQST two different division of LACDR play a major role: the Division of Pharmacology and the Division of Toxicology.
The Division of Pharmacology is involved in the Top Institute Pharma “PKPD Platform” consortium and recent IMI initiatives such as DDMoRe and K4DD. Also The EU Marie Curie project CARDIOTOX. The group has a world-leading reputation in the field of mechanistic PKPD modelling and quantitative systems pharmacology.
The Division of Toxicology of LACDR is tasked with the mechanistic and molecular understanding of cellular toxicity of drugs. The Division is actively involved in pre-competitive public-private partnerships in (inter)national collaborative projects to translate basic mechanistic understanding of toxicity in meaningful in vitro predictive models for human chemical safety evaluation. The Division is heading the High Throughput Microscopy and Screening Facility of the Faculty of Science. The Division has established a platform of GFP-based reporter assays that allow the quantitative analysis of pathways of toxicity using high content microscopy in at a single cell level. These assays are used for high throughput quantitative toxicity testing in both 2D as well as advanced 3D microtissue models. Since its existence the division has had alternative approaches as its core activity and has published over two 200 publications in this area focusing on kidney and liver toxicity.