News

Pharmacochemical research at VU University Amsterdam highly rated at international level

VU University Amsterdam research groups in Medicinal Chemistry, Molecular Toxicology and Bio-Molecular Analysis are highly rated at international level. This emerged from an evaluation report, drawn up by an independent Peer Review Committee, on research being carried out at the Leiden/Amsterdam Center for Drug Research (LACDR), to which these groups belong.

Evaluation
An international independent review committee evaluated LACDR’s research at three levels: the institution as a whole, the individual research groups, and the PhD programme. In the course of this evaluation, three research groups at VU University Amsterdam’s department of Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Chemistry were subjected to critical scrutiny:

Medicinal Chemistry (Prof. Leurs and Prof. Smit)
Molecular Toxicology (Prof. Vermeulen)
Bio-Molecular Analysis (Prof. Irth)

The review committee assessed the research on the basis of extensive written documentation and interviews. The criteria used in this investigation were scientific quality, relevance of the research, the productivity of the group, and future prospects. The predominant rating for these parts of the programmes was ‘excellent’. ‘Excellent’ indicates the research in question is at the forefront of international work in the field, and that it is often ‘cutting edge’.

Virtually all aspects of the research conducted by the Leiden LACDR groups, the PhD programme and the institute as a whole were rated as ‘excellent’.

The three VU University Amsterdam research groups (totalling about 65 staff and researchers) are both initiators and participants in the Amsterdam Institute for Molecules, Medicines and Systems (AIMMS, www.aimms.vu.nl), which was recently established by the Executive Board of VU University Amsterdam.

LACDR
The Leiden/Amsterdam Center for Drug Research (LACDR) is an inter-university and interfaculty research institute in which scientific research is conducted by three research groups at the VU University Amsterdam Faculty of Sciences (www.chem.vu.nl) and by the interfaculty Department of Bio-Pharmaceutical Sciences, consisting of seven research groups (www.lacdr.nl), at Leiden University.