Adrián Seijas-Gamardo is awarded the Faculty of Impact NWO grant

MERLNs PhD Candidate Adrián Seijas-Gamardo is awarded with the Faculty of Impact award with the project 'Fibercyte: Simplicity for the complex organ-on-a-chip revolution'. FiberCyte is a new technology that helps scientists build tiny, realistic models of human organs in the lab. These “organ-on-a-chip” models can be used to safely test new medicines and study diseases, offering a better, faster, and more ethical alternative to animal testing. FiberCyte uses a smart material to easily create the complex shapes or tiny blood vessels found in real organs, making the process simpler, quicker, and more affordable for researchers. This breakthrough helps bringing better treatments to patients, while reducing the need for animal experiments.

Adrián shares "I am exited to explore how our templating technology can move from the lab to a product that advance the organ-on-a-chip field. The Faculty of Impact gives me the chance to turn one of my PhD projects into a tool that other researchers and companies can use in their own labs.”

The Faculty of Impact (FoI programme) helps entrepreneurial researchers to take a step. The programme is intended for scientific researchers who want to make an impact with their research and who are also interested in developing entrepreneurial skills in order to set up their own business. In an intensive two-year programme, the fellows are coached and they develop important skills to transform their ideas into a scalable commercial or social start-up. The Faculty of Impact contributes to the valorisation of scientific research and is a partnership between Universities of the Netherlands (UNL), the individual universities, Techleap.nl and NWO.