The PREMSTEM team met in Barcelona on 12 and 13 May 2025 for the annual in person meeting, held just before the project’s public conference. Invited to the meeting were consortium partners as well as members of our scientific advisory boards.  

We shared our latest research progress and findings as well as updates related to the project’s important community engagement and dissemination activities. It was also an opportunity to discuss our future plans, including the translation of our work to the clinic and the strategies for disseminating our many results through scientific and wider public audience focused publications.  

Highlights from the annual meeting: 

• The University of Maastricht is in the middle of a huge amount of experimental work with the long-term asphyxia studies in the large animal model currently in progress. The team was excited to report that in their long-term infection model, recovery of the brain’s white matter has been seen following stem cell treatment. 

• The Maastricht team is also looking for correlations between the data retrieved from MRI and histology compared to behavioural outcomes in their long-term large animal investigations.  

• UMCU has successfully brought together a summary of the complex and exhaustive set of studies on the effect of stem cells on different cell types in the brain from our in vitro studies. These studies include the efficacy of stem cells in paradigms of cell death, inflammation and oligodendrocyte dysmaturation, and how their efficacy differs from creatine and hypoxic preconditioning.  

• Universitätsklinikum Essen is completing its data collection, including MRI analyses and biodistribution studies to see where stem cells end up in the body after administration.  

• Thanks to ultrafast ultrasound technology developed by the Iconeus team, we are seeing in super high resolution how inflammation reduces or slows down brain activity in small animal models.  

• We heard from our communications colleagues about progress on the production of an illustrated story about preterm birth. This illustrated story will be one of PREMSTEM’S enduring non-scientific contributions, providing a reassuring but informative story of how two families deal with preterm birth and the impacts on their children. This story will be available online for free and in clinics and hospitals across the consortium members. 

• PREMSTEM officially ends on 31 December 2025, and final reporting will be submitted to the European Commission by the end of February 2026. The team is sad to see PREMSTEM come to an end but invigorated by the scale of the scientific discovery and the opportunities for our findings to positively impact the lives of babies and their families in the future.  

We look forward to catching up again on online in September 2025.