i₂TRON - PhD Training Program

Host Institutions & Partners

1. Host Institutes

Luxembourg Institute of Health

LIH’s mission is to generate and translate research knowledge into clinical applications with an impact on the future challenges of health care and personalised medicine. The institute is organized in three departments and several scientific support structures.

The Department of Oncology aims to achieve excellence through research that will have a strong impact on reducing the cancer burden within the Luxembourg population and beyond. The main activities of the department are focused on experimental cancer research with a strong translational profile, including programs in personalized medicine.
The Department of Infection and Immunity aims to understand the complex mechanisms of infectious and inflammatory disease processes to enable new ways to diagnose, prevent or cure human diseases. Such a strategy requires the existence of a highly interdisciplinary research environment with intensive collaboration of basic and clinical immunologists, engineers, biochemists, computational and systems biologists, public health specialists, and clinician-scientists.
The Department of Population Health is an interdisciplinary research center focusing on epidemiology and public health research across a wide range of areas including cardio-metabolic conditions, sports medicine, human biomonitoring, health economics, and clinical investigations. By the evidence it generates, it aims at tackling the major causes of morbidity and mortality, improving quality of life, and informing clinical and public health guidelines in the country.

Support structures:
The Translational Transversal Medicine (TTM) initiative was created in 2019 as a horizontal structure to enhance the ability of biomedical stakeholder institutions to work translationally, fostering national and international bed-to-bench-to-bed collaborations and thereby acting as a bridge between fundamental research and clinical practice. It also hosts the i2TRON DTU, due to its unique translational character.
The Integrated Biobank of Luxembourg (IBBL) is an institute organised within LIH and dedicated to supporting biomedical research for the benefit of patients. They provide biospecimen-related services and a biobanking infrastructure for applied medical research.
The Quantitative Biology Unit (QBU) hosts several technology platforms which are focused on supporting other scientists in the life science field. They combine imaging, single cell technologies with genomics and proteomics to answer biological questions.

University of Luxembourg

Founded in 2003, the University of Luxembourg is the only public university of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Multilingual, international, and research-oriented, it is also a modern institution with a personal atmosphere.

Combining molecular, cellular, and computational approaches, research at the University of Luxembourg’s Life Sciences and Medicine Research Unit focuses on the fundamental understanding of biological processes relevant to human diseases to make use of it for biomedical applications.

The Luxembourg Centre of Systematic Bioscience is an interdisciplinary research center accelerating biomedical research by closing the link between systems biology and biomedical research. Collaboration between biologists, medical doctors, computer scientists, physicists, engineers, and mathematicians is offering new insights into complex systems like cells, organs, and organisms. These insights are essential for understanding principal mechanisms of disease pathogenesis and for developing new tools in diagnostics and therapy.

Laboratoire national de santé

The Laboratoire national de santé (LNS) is a public institution that operates under the Ministry of Health in Luxembourg. Its mission is to act as a national diagnostic and reference laboratory as well as to develop analytical activities and scientific expertise related to the prevention, diagnosis, and monitoring of human diseases such as cancer.

Centre Hospitalier de Luxembourg

The Centre Hospitalier de Luxembourg (CHL) is a regional center for diagnostic, care, treatment, and hospitalisation with a focus on research and education. CHL has a multidisciplinary team of doctors and caregivers that provides dedicated treatment and support for cancer patients. The CHL holds strong links and long-term collaborations with LIH.