Around 30 people attended this year’s annual meeting in Utrecht on 7 and 8 September 2022. The gathering was organised over the two days by the team at UMC Utrecht with the programme including a young investigators presentation session, networking and a formal meeting.

Professor Pierre Gressens, the project coordinator, welcomed partners to the formal meeting, noting that it was the first opportunity since PREMSTEM started in 2020 to have it fully in person. Partners who weren’t able to attend and members of the project’s advisory boards were able to join online.

Work package leaders and partners then presented updates to the consortium on the progress of their tasks. Highlights included:

• The University of Gothenburg has been testing the top two options from a ranking of small animal data done by the Inserm lab in a model of germinal matrix haemorrhage. They’ve been looking at the impact of the stem cell treatment on myelin in different regions of the brain.
• The University of Maastricht is labelling the stem cells to monitor where they end up in the large animal model experiments. The technique uses gold nanoparticles – as a foreign object in the body, they give off a signal which the scientists can track.
• The Maastricht team is also assessing the long-term outcomes of perinatal brain injury in preterm-born sheep, for example the impact on their social behaviour and body movements.
• The Iconeus team presented ultrafast ultrasound which is a technique used in PREMSTEM thanks to the Iconeus One machine. The technology uses microbubbles to look at the vasculature structure of the brain.

The 2023 annual meeting is scheduled to take place next September in Maastricht.

Photo credits: Sebastiaan Corstjens