Vrije Uni­versiteit Amsterdam

The Vrije Uni­versiteit Ams­ter­dam (VUA) was foun­ded in 1880 and is a pres­ti­gi­ous Dutch research uni­ver­sity with a focus on aca­demic excel­lence and soci­etal impact. Loc­ated in Ams­ter­dam, the uni­ver­sity offers diverse under­gradu­ate, gradu­ate, and doc­toral pro­grams across dis­cip­lines, fos­ter­ing a stim­u­lat­ing aca­demic environment.

The research of Prof. Mar­tine Smit and Dr. Marco Sid­erius focuses on novel con­cepts of GPCRs (e.g. con­stitutive activ­ity, endo­somal sig­nalling, dimer­isa­tion, EV bio­logy) and targeting/understanding of (onco­genic) sig­nalling net­works activ­ated by clas­sical and atyp­ical human and viral chemokine recept­ors. This divi­sion has ample exper­i­ence in drug dis­cov­ery aspects of GPCRs and col­lab­or­ate with lead­ing pharmaceutical/biotech com­pan­ies, res­ult­ing in sev­eral pat­ents. In the last dec­ade Smit and Dr. Rai­mond Heuk­ers have iden­ti­fied sev­eral nanobod­ies (single-domain anti­bod­ies) tar­get­ing and mod­u­lat­ing human and viral chemokine receptor func­tion. A new research line ini­ti­ated by Dr. Chris Schafer is adding struc­tural bio­phys­ics to fur­ther resolve and under­stand how these recept­ors func­tion. Dr. Reg­gie is focus­sing on tar­get­ing of chemokine-receptor-GAG interactions.

The Team at VUA will con­trib­ute their expert­ise and tools in chemokine receptor bio­logy to the Uni­S­ens project.

Smit lab (left to right): Mar­tine J. Smit, Marco Sid­erius, Reg­gie Bosma, Chris­topher T. Schafer, Rai­mond Heukers