Bregje de Wildt is one of the recipients of the Rubicon grant. She was a doctoral candidate in Associate Professor Sandra Hofmann's group at TU/e's Department of Biomedical Engineering. She completed her PhD in November of 2022. Since March she has been engaged by the highly reputed ETH Zurich (see the main photo, ed.).

"During my doctoral research at TU/e I worked on 3D in vitro models for human bone remodeling, working with miniature bones, as they are called," explains De Wildt. "I focused mainly on the osteoclasts and osteoblasts, the cells that respectively break down and build bone. We could make these cells produce and break down bone-like tissue, but we couldn't really regulate the process. In our bodies, we have osteocytes in our bone tissue and these control the activities of the osteoclasts and the osteoblasts. Our osteocytes are embedded in bone tissue and within this tissue they form a long network that they use to control the processes of breaking down and producing bone. In the Rubicon project I'll be using 3D bioprinting to develop an in vitro human bone model. (It'll be in a culture dish.) This new bone will contain osteocytes and they will be connected up a network. This is an important point. Often research on osteocytes involves animal experiments because these cells are so firmly embedded in the bone that they are very difficult to study outside the (human) body. Using miniature bones, it becomes possible to test medicines used in the treatment of human bone conditions, and this makes animal experiments redundant."

As to her choice of ETH, she has this to say: "I wanted to do this work at ETH because the laboratory where I'm now working does bone research at every level, and you need this if you want to fully understand bone tissue and how it responds to its environment. So, for example, they work with animal experiments, computer models, clinical data and in vitro models. Besides this, the lab uses a variety of printing methods to develop its in vitro models. The cells are embedded in these models, just like osteocytes are embedded in human bone."