'Making big data meaningful for a promising start in the first 1000 days of life'.

Posted by Admin on July 2021



Mijke Lambregtse-van den Berg is one of the work package leaders of a consortium led by Tanja Houweling from Public Health that has been awarded 1,3M euro from the NWO research agenda ‘Promising start for children with the help of big data.

All children deserve a promising start. Most children are doing fine. But some need extra support, because of problems during pregnancy, or because they grow up in disadvantaged circumstances, e.g. due to poverty or parental addiction or mental health problems. In this multidisciplinary project, we study how relevant datasets, among others of Statistics Netherlands, can be used to support these children and (expectant) parents. By ensuring more timely referral to services that meet their needs. And by tailoring municipal polities to the needs of vulnerable children and (expectant) parents. We collaborate with parents, practitioners and municipalities to ensure our research meets their priorities. This collaborative project includes partners from the Department of Public Health (Erasmus MC), the Departments of Psychiatry and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry/Psychology (Erasmus MC), the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, the City of Rotterdam, and a broad range of societal partners.

Mijke will lead the work package that focusses on consultation and participation of involved families, practitioners and policy makers to ensure the project meets their needs and concerns. In this work package also prognostic models from other work packages will be used to develop and test a dynamic tool for identification that can be integrated in existing online screening tools and digital personal health environments to guide (expectant) parents and their towards tailored interventions.

Major ZonMw investment for stem cell research into neuropsychiatric disorders.

Posted by Admin on July 2021



The Departments of Psychiatry and Clinical Genetics at Erasmus MC lead a consortium project recently funded by ZonMw's PSIDER program using human pluripotent stem cells to develop an innovative platform of therapeutic discovery for hereditary neurodevelopmental disorders.

Steven Kushner of the Department of Psychiatry and Ype Elgersma of the Department of Clinical Genetics, lead the project Towards a human iPSC neuronal platform for neurodevelopmental disorder therapeutic discovery, which was awarded 4 million euros. Femke de Vrij (Psychiatry) and Marjon van Slegtenhorst (Clinical Genetics) of Erasmus MC also participate in the consortium.

The project will identify patients who have a severe cognitive developmental disorder due to a genetic mutation. If the mutation is suitable for correction with so-called antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) therapy, stem cells are generated from blood cells of the patient. These stem cells will be differentiated into brain cells, on which the mutation-specific ASO will be tested for therapeutic rescue of disease-associated molecular and cellular phenotypes. The researchers expect this research to be the prelude to routinely developing personalized therapies for a large group of rare neuropsychiatric disorders that are currently untreatable.

The ZonMw program Pluripotent Stem cells for Inherited Diseases and Embryonic Research (PSIDER) is intended for biomedical research with induced pluripotent stem cells. Within the program, ethical, legal and social issues are a strong focus

Astrid Kamperman received a grant of 50.000 Euro of the EUR Trustfonds for the study 'Addressing the victim in the room'!

Posted by Admin on June 2021



Domestic violence is an ordinarily highly prevalent phenomenon. Families in which domestic violence is present suffer from both physical and emotional trauma, straining the family unit and sometimes resulting in the death of a family member. At the same time, the presence of domestic violence often remains undetected and unaddressed by health care professionals. We propose the use of newly emerging machine learning techniques to address this need.
In line with the NWO Artificial Intelligence Research Agenda for the Netherlands we view AI as a socio-technical system, in which technological and societal aspects of AI are inherently intertwined. In this project, we will include a technical and a social component, developed in close interaction. In the technical component, we will leverage the information standardly contained within patient electronic patient files, where rich data is collected from structured fields and unstructured clinician notes. With regard to the social component, we will explore the acceptability and legitimacy of using an AI application to detect domestic violence in mental health care. The finance will be used to study of the social component of the development and implementation of this ML algorithm in mental health care. Acceptability and legitimacy will be studied using focus groups. Focus groups will be organized such to optimally assess the perspectives of clients, clinicians, data-scientists, privacy officers and legal staff, and managerial staff.

This pilot project is a collaboration between academic and societal partners, i.e. the EMC (Dept of Psychiatry), EUR (ESHPM), Delft University of Technology (Dep of Human-Centered Design), UMC Utrecht (COVIDA, PsyData), regional mental health care institutes (Antes and BavoEuropoort/Parnassia Groep, GGZ Delfland), and patient representatives (MIND).

The Create2Solve program

Posted by Admin on May 2021

It is a great pleasure to announce that Femke de Vrij will receive a grant from ZonMw within the Create2Solve program.

This prestigious grant is a follow-up of the Phase 1 proof-of-concept study awarded last year, to continue Phase 2 of this project for 5 years with a 1M€ subsidy. Together with Steven Kushner and a talented team of researchers ( KUSHNERLAB), a 3D model will be developed with human brain cells that can simulate the brain’s complex structure in early development. These micro-brains (3D MICro-brains) will reduce the modelling of the frontal cortex to its essence in a format of, literally, a millionth of the normal brain volume.
The platform contains all relevant brain cell types: functional neurons and glia in layered radial structures, including astrocytes, myelin-producing oligodendrocytes and microglia that play a crucial role in inflammatory processes in the brain.

Furthermore, this model is entirely animal-free and thus contributes to the transition to animal-free research. Due to its scale and reproducibility, this platform is ideally suited for automated applications in drug development and research, which will be further elaborated with industry partner Core Life Analytics that will add automated, high-resolution image processing to this project.

For more information, see: ZonMw

'From surgery to active surveillance in esophageal cancer patients (SANO-2 study).'

Posted by Admin on May 2021



It is a great pleasure to announce that Leonieke Kranenburg, who in collaboration with colleagues from the department of Surgery, received a grant of 275k Euro for the study 'From surgery to active surveillance in esophageal cancer patients (SANO-2 study)'.

The grant was approved by an Erasmus MC Internal grant and the Zilveren Kruis (Theia Foundation and Foundation Achmea Gezondheidszorg).
Within this project, the departments Surgery and Psychiatry closely collaborate. Two PhD-candidates, a physician-researcher and psychologist will jointly investigate the clinical and psychological outcomes of an experimental non-invasive treatment for esophageal cancer patients. Next to outcomes with regard to the effectivity and safety of this active surveillance treatment, the project focuses on the practice of decision counseling and on the psychological outcomes of decisional regret, fear of cancer recurrence and quality of life in this patient group.

Connect2Grow projectteam

Posted by Admin on April 2021

Mijke Lambregtse-van den Berg, Hilmar Bijma en het Connect2Grow projectteam hebben een subsidie van 50.000 euro ontvangen binnen het SET COVID-19 2.0 programma van de overheid.

Connect2Grow is een leer- en verbeterproject waarbij zorgverleners samenwerken met ouders in de gemeente Rotterdam. Zij brengen samen in kaart wat nodig is, bij gezinnen in complexe kwetsbare omstandigheden, om een gezonde relatie met hun (ongeboren) baby op te bouwen. Het is een gezamenlijk project van het Erasmus MC Rotterdam (afdelingen Verloskunde, Psychiatrie en Kinder- en Jeugdpsychiatrie) en de gemeente Rotterdam, waarbij nauw wordt samengewerkt met andere instanties en zorgverleners in Rotterdam.

Met de komst van Covid-19 is er een grote urgentie om deze zorg ook meer digitaal te ondersteunen. Hiervoor heeft het Connect2Grow team in samenwerking met MijnKindOnline een zorgnetwerkmodule ontwikkeld om deze zorg digitaal te kunnen ondersteunen. Middels deze subsidie zal deze module ook in andere regio’s rond Rotterdam worden aangeboden, met als doel om dit uiteindelijk ook landelijk te kunnen gaan implementeren.

Zie voor meer informatie over het Connect2Grow project: www.connect2grow.info