As this faculty is part of the hospital, most researchers focus on clinical applications. This means they study diseases and try to understand why some people get sick while others do not. They do this using models made from stem cells, for example. They also work on finding and developing new treatments, such as cell or gene therapies in regenerative medicine. This involves not only lab researchers but also those in ethics, health economics, and the doctors who treat patients. Most regenerative medicine researchers at the Faculty of Medicine (LUMC) are based in the Department of Internal Medicine or the Department of Anatomy and Embryology. Many work in the LUMC laboratories at the Mirai House, but you’ll also find researchers in the hospital and research buildings. Research facilities play an important role as well.

Within this faculty, drug development is a key focus. Researchers here work on creating new, better, and safer medicines, as well as developing new techniques for discovering drugs. They also innovate ways to deliver the right drugs at the right dosage and location. They use several approaches to test and develop drugs, including one by making use of stem cell models. The researchers involved in this work are based at the Leiden Academic Center for Drug Research (LACDR).

At this faculty, legal scholars research the interaction between new developments and legislation. Since the field of regenerative medicine is still very new, many legal questions remain unanswered. For example, can donors give researchers permission to use their cells, even if the researchers don’t yet know whether they can create a treatment from them? If they do develop a cell therapy from those cells, can they give it to patients, or does it still belong to the donor? And which patients have the right to this new treatment? These legal questions are explored within the Department of Child Law & Health Law.

This faculty conducts research on societal developments and human culture. Although the full impact of regenerative medicine on society is still uncertain, it is clear that it will be significant. History has seen many medical advancements, like vaccinations or the contraceptive pill, that have had a major impact on society. These groundbreaking technologies do much good, but they also raise questions and resistance among certain groups. What can we learn from such developments to better understand the potential impact of regenerative medicine? These are questions that the Institute for History can help us answer.