Grants

NWO Open Competition ENW-XS grant

Wednesday 13 December 2023
Dr. Peter Fodran has received an NWO ENW-XS grant from the Dutch Research Council (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijke Onderzoek, NWO) for his project "Visible-light-powered recycling of pharmaceutical building blocks".

NWO XS grant

Wednesday 29 November 2023
Dr. Sandy Schmidt has received an NWO XS grant (€50,000) from the Dutch Research Council (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijke Onderzoek, NWO) for her project "Turning pollution into value: engineering carbon-hungry microbes".
Many industries (e.g. steel production) release carbon-rich (waste) gases contributing 5-7% of global CO2 emissions. One of the most important steps towards a carbon-neutral bio-economy is the valorization of such waste gases as a feedstock for producing valuable chemicals. Microbes have the ability to grow on these gases and convert them into useful products and materials for our society. In this project, we aim to tailor the metabolism of a well-known and robust biotechnological bacterium to make it an efficient consumer of carbon monoxide, one of the main components of these waste gases along with CO2.

NWO XS grant

Tuesday 6 June 2023
Dr. Kristina Haslinger has received a NWO XS grant (€50,000) for her project ‘Tackling fungal infections at their roots – developing precision drugs acting on the packaging of DNA'.
Severe fungal infections affect 1.5% of the Dutch population annually. One tenth of these cases is caused by (multi-)drug resistant fungi. The low survival rate among these patients (less than 50%) urgently calls for the development of new antifungal drugs. In this project Dr. Kristina Haslinger aims to target a very fundamental process governing the transition to a pathogenic lifestyle in fungi, namely changes in the packaging of DNA. She will develop new, highly specific chemical inhibitors that target key players in this process with high precision. This research will open the door for the development of new antifungal drugs.

Horizon Europe (HORIZON) project

The team of Dr. Frank Dekker participates in a Horizon Europe (HORIZON) project that is funded (Call: HORIZON-HLTH-2022-DISEASE-06-two-stage). The project is called 'In Armor' and concerns the pre-clinical development of small molecule inhibitors of histone lysine deacetylases (HDAC) for the induction of antimicrobial peptides. The project will be performed by a consortium of 16 participants from 11 different European countries with a budget of 6 million Euros. The Dekker team is funded with €390,000 to work the synthesis and characterization of a focussed collection of HDAC inhibitors.

ERC Starting grant

Tuesday 22 November 2022
Dr. Sandy Schmidt has received an ERC Starting Grant worth €1.5 million from the European Research Council. In the RECNNSTRCT project, Dr. Sandy Schmidt will reconstruct enzymes for novel nitrogen-nitrogen bond forming chemistry.

FSE Research grant

Wednesday 26 October 2022
Dr. Kristina Haslinger has received a FSE grant for her project ‘Antifungals from lichen-forming fungi - exploiting natural competition to discover new drug candidates’.

Open Competition Science-M1 grant

Thursday 22 September 2022
Dr. Frank Dekker has been awarded an Open Competition Science-M1 grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for his project ‘Breaking therapy resistance in for Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML)’. The grant consists of approximately €360,000.

Vidi grant

Friday 1 July 2022
Dr. Sandy Schmidt has received a Vidi grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Her research aims to make enzymes (nature’s catalysts) that can make the chemical reactions used in the pharmaceutical and chemical industry, less polluting. The grant consists of €800,000.

NWO XS grant

Thursday 21 April 2022
Dr. Sandy Schmidt has received an NWO XS grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for her project ‘Capturing carbon, creating value: Teaching carbon dioxide eating bacteria new tricks’. The grant consists of €50,000.

Two Horizon Europe MSCA Doctoral Network grants

Thursday 14 April 2022
Dr. Sandy Schmidt and Prof. Gerrit J. Poelarends have received Horizon Europe MSCA Doctoral Network grants.

Dr. Sandy Schmidt is the coordinator and Prof. Gerrit J. Poelarends is a partner in the BiodeCCodiNNg project. The project BiodeCCodiNNg aims to decode novel reaction chemistries from enzymes that are not accessible with the existing biocatalyst portfolio. With this, the researchers intend to build important molecules such as precursors for pharmaceuticals. The grant consists of €820,000.

Prof. Gerrit J. Poelarends is a partner in the BiocatCodeExpander project. The aim of the project is to expand the diversity of functional groups present in proteins. With this, the consortium intents to enhance biocatalysis by using non-canonical amino acids (NCAAs) as building blocks for enzyme engineering. This project receives almost €2.7 million.

FEBS Excellence Award 2021

Tuesday 25 January 2022
Dr. Kristina Haslinger received an Excellence Award from the Federation of European Biochemical Societies. She is one of the recipients of the prestigious FEBS Excellence Award 2021 for early career principal investigators, awarded by the Federation of European Biochemical Societies worth €100,000. This award is to be used for her investigation of the microbiome of medicinal plants in order to understand how microbes contribute to the production of specialized metabolites in plants. This project is part of a new research line that Dr. Kristina Haslinger began in early 2020 at the University of Groningen.