The Dutch Translation Metabolism Conference is a yearly conference that brings together all researchers working in the field of metabolism. It is a 2-day conference in which early stage carreer scientist get the opportunity to present their work. This is accompanied by a masterclass and international keynote lectures of renowned experts in the field.

Heart failure poses a large burden on patients and healthcare, largely because heart failure patients have low fitness and require frequent hospitalisation for close monitoring. In CardiacCare@Home, researchers work together with patients, doctors, industry, and others to develop technology for home-based monitoring of cardiac function and rehabilitation. This approach facilitates early detection of worsening of cardiac function, which allows doctors to rapidly alter treatment and prevent hospitalisation. Moreover, home-based rehabilitation will improve patients’ fitness levels. Technological innovations will facilitate a new care path that improves patients’ quality of life and lower socio-economic costs, and lower burden for hospital staff.

Sharing of human physiological data openly is hampered by privacy concerns and proprietary software use. With our Ph-air data project, we intend to enhance the adoption of open data sharing for physiology science, by removing obstacles, providing tools, and educating the next generation of physiologist. Specifically, we aim to 1) implement synthetic datasets from human physiological data to anonymize data deeply, 2) recode physiological data pipelines from proprietary software to R and 3) build blueprints and educational tools to disseminate how to incorporate best practices for open data sharing in physiology research.

Pig health relies critically on well-functioning intestinal epithelium. Epithelial dysfunction causes disruption of the gut barrier resulting in inflammation, diarrhea, mal-absorption of nutrients, and, consequently, reduced growth. After weaning, gut barrier function is often compromised due to prolonged periods of low feed intake. In addition, delayed adaptation to the digestion of vegetable proteins leads to proteins escaping digestion in the proximal small intestine and an subsequent fermentation these can be fermented in the distal small intestine or colon. The end-products of fermentation contribute to the impaired barrier function and thus to the occurrence of post-weaning diarrhea. Intestinal epithelial cells require a vast amount of energetic substrates to power cellular processes that preserve its barrier function. Mitochondria not only generate most of the energy from these energetic substrates, they also form a platform that controls metabolic and immunological and metabolic function of the cell. We postulate that optimal functioning of mitochondria is crucial for maintaining pig gut barrier function. In the proposed research, we analyze the effects of protein fermentation end-products on intestinal epithelial mitochondrial metabolism and signaling in pigs using innovative metabolic and transcriptomic approaches. Furthermore, we will perform high-throughput functional screening of fermentation products on cellular metabolic health and validate whether nutritional compounds that activate mitochondria can protect barrier function from identified adverse protein fermentation products. Finally, we will analyze whether these mito-active compounds, when supplemented in milk before weaning, can support intestinal pig barrier function and protect weaned pigs from post-weaning diarrhea.