ZonMW Open Competition Grant for Marta de Ruijter-Villani, Geert Kops and Takashi Hiiragi

Marta de Ruijter-Villani, Assistant Professor at Clinical Sciences and UMCU, receives a ZonMw Open Competition grant together with Geert Kops and Takashi Hiiragi. Attached to the grant is a sum of €770,000, which the researchers will use over the next five years to investigate the occurrence of aneuploidy in human oocytes and embryos. Aneuploidy is an abnormal number of chromosomes. One in five couples struggle to conceive children. Some of these couples seek the solution in assisted reproduction and in vitro fertilisation, or IVF. Yet some 70 per cent of IVF attempts are found to be unsuccessful. The main cause is aneuploidy: an incorrect number of chromosomes in the embryonic cells.