During the closing ceremony of the EUROoCS 2020 conference five prizes were awarded:

-Two Best Presentation Young Investigator Awards (selected from 19 of 32 presentations in total)
-Best Presentation Senior Investigator Award
-Two Best Poster Awards (129 posters in total)

The presentation awards were elected by a jury of ten experts chaired by Alexander Mosig from Jena University Hospital, Germany. The poster awards were chosen by a jury of ten experts chaired by Nathalie Picollet-D’hahan from CEA, France.

Congratulations to the following awardees:

Best Presentation Young Investigator Awards
Award 1:
The Best Presentation Young Investigator Award (€ 500), sponsored by Ushio (Japan) was awarded to Joram Mooiweer (University Medical Center Groningen, the Netherlands) for his talk ‘Celiac disease-on-chip: modeling a multifactorial disease in vitro’. The Celiac disease model will enable studies on the underlying disease mechanism and will provide opportunities for precision medicine approaches to treat this complex disease. The presentation was prepared in collaboration with his colleague Renée Moerkens, also at the University Medical Center Groningen.

Joram Mooiweer: Generation of the Celiac disease-on-chip model

Award 2:
The other Best Presentation Young Investigator Award (€500) went to Oliver Schneider (Fraunhofer IGB/University of Tübingen, Germany) for his talk ‘Electrical pacing of hiPSC-derived cardiac µ-tissues in a centrifugal Heart-on-Chip platform’. By implementing electrical pacing capabilities of this new design, Oliver demonstrated that the Heart-on-Chip platform has become a valuable tool for investigating advanced tissue maturation via electrical stimulation.

Olivier Schneider: Chip composition, showing electrode insertion into the media module

Best Presentation Senior Investigator Award
Lisa Hoelting from InSphero AG (Switzerland) received the Best Presentation Senior Investigator Award (€500) for her talk ‘Applying a microphysiological 3D human liver-islet microtissue platform to study drug-drug interaction in metabolic diseases’. The liver – islet MPS platform will be used for studies on metabolic disease progression, drug efficacy and toxicity testing, drug – drug interaction and drug clearance assays.

Lisa Hoelting: Drug-drug interactions in the liver-islet MPS platform

Best Poster Awards
Award 1:
The Best Poster Award (€250), sponsored by UPM Biomedicals is granted to Marc Vila Cuenca (Leiden University Medical Center, the Netherlands) for his poster entitled ‘Generating CADASIL patient-derived Vessels-on-Chip to model hereditary cerebral small vessel disease’. The hiPSC-based 3D Vessels-on-Chip network that has been developed in the group of Valeria Orlova will be used to recapitulate CADASIL pathogenesis by including patient-derived vascular smooth muscle cells and endothelial cells.

Marc Vila Cuenca: hiPSC-derived Blood Vessel-on-Chip

Award 2:
Bilge Sen Elci (EPFL, Switzerland) also received a Best Poster Award (€250) for her poster entitled ‘A Bile Duct-on-a-Chip’. The microfluidic chip-based approach to steer hepatobiliary organoid development into tubular tissues within microfabricated extracellular matrices (ECM) resulted in a Bile Duct-on-a-Chip with significant potential for the study of cholangiopathies.

Bilge Sen Elci: Bile Duct Tube Formation-on-Chip from mouse liver ductal organoid derived sible cells

Honourable mentions:
The poster jury has also decided that the following scientists deserve an honourable mention because of their excellent posters:

Merve Bulut (Leiden University Medical Center, the Netherlands): Engineered 3D vessels-on-chip to model inflammatory responses using hiPSC-derived endothelial cells

Julia Rogal (Fraunhofer IGB / University of Tübingen, Germany): WAT’s up: a human immuno-competent and patient-specific white adipose tissue-on-a-chip

Ann-Kristin Muhsmann (Technical University Berlin, Germany): Fully automated multiorgan-chip assay execution and analysis

Katharina Schlünder (Fraunhofer IGB / University of Tübingen, Germany): PDMS-free microphysiological Pancreas-on-Chip platform to model endocrine function and metabolism

Peter Ertl (Vienna University of Technology, Austria): Microfluidic Multi-sized Brain Organoid Microarray for BBB transport screening

Nuria Roldan (AlveoliX, Switzerland): A smart breathing alveolus on chip model: concept and applications