Human Osteochondral Explants: Reliable Biomimetic Models to Investigate Disease Mechanisms and Develop Personalized Treatments for Osteoarthritis.

Introduction: Likely due to ignored heterogeneity in disease pathophysiology, osteoarthritis (OA) has become the most common disabling joint disease, without effective disease-modifying treatment causing a large social and economic burden. In this study we set out to explore responses of aged human osteochondral explants upon different OA-related perturbing triggers (inflammation, hypertrophy and mechanical stress) for future tailored biomimetic human models.

Methods: Human osteochondral explants were treated with IL-1β (10 ng/ml) or triiodothyronine (T3; 10 nM) or received 65% strains of mechanical stress (65% MS).

The Genome of the Netherlands: design, and project goals.

Within the Netherlands a national network of biobanks has been established (Biobanking and Biomolecular Research Infrastructure-Netherlands (BBMRI-NL)) as a national node of the European BBMRI. One of the aims of BBMRI-NL is to enrich biobanks with different types of molecular and phenotype data. Here, we describe the Genome of the Netherlands (GoNL), one of the projects within BBMRI-NL.

Lipid metabolism in long-lived families: the Leiden Longevity Study.

Mechanisms underlying the variation in human life expectancy are largely unknown, but lipid metabolism and especially lipoprotein size was suggested to play an important role in longevity. We have performed comprehensive lipid phenotyping in the Leiden Longevity Study (LLS). By applying multiple logistic regression analysis we tested for the first time the effects of parameters in lipid metabolism (i.