We are delighted to announce that the Vinča Institute of Nuclear Sciences (VINS) has joined the GlioLighT project through the European Commission’s Hop-on facility!
What is a Hop-on?
The Hop-on facility allows institutions from Widening access countries, who may not have the same access to funding or research infrastructure, to ‘hop’ onto existing Pillar II and EIC Pathfinder projects.
This way, up-and-coming research institutes can make connections with major players in consortia, visit partner institutes to understand how cutting-edge research is done, and establish their footing in the frontier of European science. Currently, only one Hop-on is allowed to join any one project.
The research that Hop-on partners do may not directly contribute to the project’s aims, but instead closely aligns with project research to establish important findings in the subject area.
Our Hop-on, VINS
VINS has begun visits to our partner institutes to learn about how they are conducting GlioLight research: in April, they visited our JGU laboratories in Mainz. Here, they got first-hand training on preparing glioma spheroids from our JGU researchers Dr Anne Vigouroux and Sophie Gieß, achieving their first milestone towards establishing in vitro and in vivo glioma models for detecting singlet oxygen in tumour tissue upon laser illumination.
In May, they visited our laser partners at Aston University in a (rare) sunny Birmingham, where Professor Edik Rafailov and Dr Viktor Dremin demonstrated a slightly different experimental approach to determining the cytotoxic effect of direct laser light on glioma cells.
In the coming years, the VINS team plans to visit all our partners. We’re very excited to support them in our joint research aims, and we can’t wait to celebrate their achievements with them!
The VINS and Aston teams enjoy the sunshine at Aston University!
