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2024 Annual meeting

The PREMSTEM team met in Gothenburg on 10 and 11 June 2024 for the annual in person meeting and Young Investigator Session. Thank you to Henrik Hagberg from the University of Gothenburg for his hard work to host the PREMSTEM consortium in Sweden while also organising the biannual Hershey Conference on Developmental Brain Injury that started the day after.

Besides hearing comprehensive updates from each work package leader, we also listened to a presentation from the Chiesi team about the road to clinical trials and got an update from RMIT Europe about the PREMSTEM final conference which is currently in the planning.

Some key points from the discussions at the annual meeting:

  • Given delays to our scientific work, mostly due to the Covid-19 pandemic but also related to an infection outbreak in The Netherlands that affected the large animal models, we will seek an extension from the European Commission to take the project into 2025.
  • Building on the successful testing of our stem cells in the small animal models, RMIT University is examining tissues from the large animal studies carried out in Maastricht to analyse the effectiveness of the stem cell treatment.
  • The University of Geneva is using MRI to show the disturbance in brain structure caused by the infection model in the sheep models.
  • The University of Maastricht has begun planning the investigations into the efficacy of the stem cells in the long-term hypoxic-ischemic (decreased oxygen and blood flow) sheep model.
  • In the work package led by UMCU, creatine and hypoxic preconditioning of the stem cells is generally improving outcomes across different cell types in the brain in isolated cells. Creatine preloading allows the storage of more energy by promoting mitochondrial function in the stem cell.
  • Iconeus provided an update on tech development and software deployment relevant to PREMSTEM.
  • The co-creation activities have finished and a report has been submitted to the European Commission. Once approved, this will be made available on the PREMSTEM website.

Our next meeting will be held in 2025 before the final conference in Barcelona.