For nine years, the School of Applied Biosciences and Chemistry at HAN University of Applied Sciences has offered the master’s in Molecular Life Sciences in its current format. To the full satisfaction of the university itself, the students and the professional field. ‘These students are being prepared for the industry’.
One of those satisfied companies is Enzyre. Based at the Novio Tech Campus in Nijmegen, the Radboudumc start-up has a clear mission: ‘to bring the lab to the patient’. Waander van Heerde, CSO of Enzyre: ‘People with chronic diseases have to measure blood values regularly in hospital. With the devices we are developing, this will soon no longer be necessary, giving patients more quality of life.’
Enzyre was founded 8 years ago. Soon after its launch, two students from the Molecular Life Sciences master’s programme started there as interns. Anneke Sijbers, manager QA/RA, says these students are now employees of the company. And she adds that there is a chance that the third intern will also continue to work within Enzyre.
Apparently, Molecular Life Sciences trainees make a good impression. Van Heerde: ‘The advantage of these trainees is that we have them for the duration of the course (2 years, ed.) and not just for 3 or 6 months. So we can mould them to our needs and we know what we can get from them.’ Sijbers adds: ‘And for the last six months, they have even been working with us full-time for their graduation internship.’ ‘But the biggest plus of the programme is that the curriculum prepares these master’s students very well for the pharma and biotech industry. This is in contrast to university masters,’ says Van Heerde.
‘We get to hear more often from our internship companies that students can immediately start working independently,’ says Andrea Thiele, programme manager of the master’s education. ‘What students learn with us, they can immediately put into practice during the long internship (full-time students), or at their own workplace (part-time student). And in our master’s programme, there is a lot of focus on developing project management skills next to the science, which is also appreciated by our internship companies. It is not for nothing that the relationship with these partners is good.’
Elena Krivosheeva is one of the Molecular Life Sciences master students who did her internship at Enzyre. The born Russian finished a Bachelor Medical Physics at Peter the Great Polytechnic University in St. Petersburg, a multi-disciplinary study, and worked in a lab there after her studies. In 2022, she made the move to Nijmegen to start her master’s degree fulltime. ‘The research I did during my master study had to do with identification of synthetic substrates to certain enzymes present in human blood. The discovery of such substrates will allow their implementation on the Enzyre’s product and therefore expand the panel of tests for the diagnostics.’
Krivosheeva got a lot out of her master’s. ‘At first I found the Dutch education system a bit complicated. I think this master is advantageous because you can develop both science skills and project management skills. Those are the things you really need in your working life.’
For more information on the master Molecular Life Sciences, check our webpages
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