Category: News

The PhD position at the University of Tübingen is currently open again! All details and application info can be found here: https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/374975

At her current secondment to Tübingen, Daria, our DC from Uppsala University, was able to meet (and even help to clinically assess!) Poyraz, the first (and so far only) patient in Europe treated with a personalized ASO – and the very person for whom, as key part of her MMM PhD work, she tries to develop advanced statistical models to decipher a clinical effect of the ASO on a single subject level!

Read more about Poyraz’s story here: https://lnkd.in/e9hhmp3Q

Photo: private

Two weeks ago, the MMM DCs had the incredible opportunity to spend three days at AstraZeneca, exploring every layer of the antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) development pipeline — from early-stage design and manufacturing to safety studies, pharmacodynamics, and pharmacokinetics. Trainers and trainees were from the MMM network and from AstraZeneca.

What made this workshop truly unique was the hands-on approach. Through case studies, trainees were able to immediately apply what they learned, deciding the ASO strategy and designing the testing approach. They also explored the clinical landscape — thinking beyond just the variant, and into the eligibility of the patient and disease, shaping n-of-1 or n-of-few treatments and trials.

With the visit to AstraZeneca, the differences in the ASO pipeline between industry and academia were clearly highlighted. As Iqra put it perfectly, “In industry, they can test 400 ASOs — compared to our lab in academia, where we test 4.” The contrast in scale really put things into perspective how collaboration is really important if we want to bring ASO therapy into the clinic.

And yes — we also discovered that the Pope once thanked AstraZeneca for helping to stop a bout of hiccups using lidocaine (though the evidence might be a bit shaky 👀). Huge thanks to Shalini Andersson and Erica Bäckström from the AstraZeneca team for hosting us and to all the speakers from both 1M1M and AstraZeneca for their insightful talks (Shalini Andersson, Annemieke Aartsma-Rus, Willeke van Roon-Mom, Tobias Pöhlmann, Tom Baladi, Marie Kalm, Peter Gennemark, Rebecca Schüle) – you have shown that collaboration isn’t just valuable, it’s essential. And this week, we truly experienced how much we can learn from it!

In December 2024, MMM’s Mid-Term Meeting took place in Tübingen and was a full success! We also took the opportunity to add another two days of Business Training for our DCs. These were also the first meetings with all ten DCs complete! We hope you will all thrive and prosper in your PhD studies over the next years!

From 7 to 8 June 2024, we organised MMM’s first General Assembly in Barcelona. It was a full success, with talks by all MMM members and much opportunity for discussion and exchange! Let’s keep up the good work!

The seven Doctoral Candidates recruited for MMM so far had their first training – on Project Management – from 1-2 June 2024 in Barcelona. Ingrid, Laura, Alex, Raúl, Jack, Seppe and Lasse – we wish you a good start in the MMM network!