In August 2021, the Luxembourg node of the European Research Infrastructure for Translational Medicine (EATRIS) network was granted the EATRIS Node Reward Framework award for its significant contribution to the efforts and impact of the European infrastructure in advancing translational medicine in 2020.

On July 1st 2021, Dr Torsten Bohn from the Nutrition and Health Research Group (DoPH), became part of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) panel for Nutrition, Novel Foods and Allergens (NDA). This highly sought-after position makes Dr Bohn one of only 16 external EFSA experts able to advise on Diet and Health decisions for the whole of Europe.

A fruitful collaboration between Research and Development teams* of the Luxembourg Institute of Health and the Centre Hospitalier de Luxembourg (CHL) enabled the development of the Visceral Fat Calculator, an online tool providing an accurate and easy evaluation of the visceral fat depots for adults.

The Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH) and the Centre Hospitalier de Luxembourg (CHL) announce the launch of “SCOL” (Study of Continuous Oral Levodopa), a unique international clinical trial aiming to assess the safety, tolerability and efficacy of the new DopaFuse System for the continuous oral delivery of levodopa to better treat the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease. The clinical trial, which is being conducted concomitantly in Italy, Spain and Luxembourg, has the potential to revolutionise the treatment of this common neurodegenerative disease by facilitating drug delivery and reducing side effects.

Researchers from the LIH Department of Population Health (DoPH) and from the LIH Quantitative biology Unit (QBU) leveraged advanced artificial intelligence and machine-learning approaches to classify a sample of individuals representative of the Luxembourgish population into distinct risk groups, paving the way towards more targeted strategies for the prevention of cardiometabolic diseases at a population level. The findings were published on August 6th 2021 in the Nature Portfolio journal “Scientific Reports”.

The Luxembourgish National Cancer Registry (RNC) at LIH joined the consortium of the European Health Data & Evidence Network (EHDEN). The LIH team, which involves the RNC, the IT eXpertise in Health Data (IT-X-HD) and the Deep Digital Phenotyping Research Unit of the LIH Department of Population Health (DoPH), as well as the IT company Information Technology for Translational Medicine (ITTM), secured a cross-disciplinary grant for a duration of 12 months to accelerate the standardisation of clinical data.

“The year 2020 can undoubtedly be defined as the most momentous period in the history of science and mankind and, consequently, for LIH and for the national biomedical research ecosystem in which it operates. The present annual report provides an unparalleled opportunity to reflect on the scientific excellence of our institute and celebrate the many collective achievements of its dedicated staff” – Prof Ulf Nehrbass, LIH CEO.

Claude Turmes, the Minister of Energy and Spatial Planning in Luxembourg, visited the Luxembourg Institute of Health on June 25 2021. As part of the guided tour, Dr Torsten Bohn of the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH) gave a short presentation on the BIOVAL project, a collaboration that aims to up-cycle the organic waste produced from the brewing of beer to create other food and chemical products.

Researchers from the Laboratory of Oncolytic-Virus-Immuno-Therapeutics (LOVIT) at the LIH Department of Oncology (DONC) are working on the development of novel anticancer strategies based on oncolytic viruses, “good” viruses that can specifically infect, replicate in and kill cancer cells. In particular, the LOVIT team elucidated the mechanism through which the H-1PV cancer-destroying virus can attach to and enter cancer cells, thereby causing their lysis and death. At the heart of this process lie laminins, and specifically laminin γ1, a family of proteins on the surface of a cancer cell to which this virus binds, and which therefore act as the ‘door’ through which the virus enters the cells. The findings, which were published in the prestigious international journal Nature Communications, carry significant implications for the advancement of virus-based anticancer strategies and for the prediction of a patient’s response to this innovative therapeutic approach.