SINPAIN Progress Meeting held in Homburg

On 1-2 December 2025, the SINPAIN consortium gathered in Homburg/Saar, Germany for their bi-annual meeting. The meeting was kindly hosted by the team of Saarland University Hospital.

We are coming ever closer to the end of the project which means that discussions among partners intensified to overcome current challenges with appropriate solutions. Our experiments with the hydrogel formulation did not prove as effective as we hoped. However, thanks to the dynamism and reactivity of the SINPAIN team, alternatives have been investigated and in vitro experiments will continue with the new formulation to achieve the final goal of SINPAIN, i.e. having a new treatment for OA. On the positive side, we were able to show that the model of the bioreactor developed by Swiss partner AO Research Institute is working. After developing a 3D co-culture, this model is used to evaluate the nanotherapeutic agents with chondrocytes-pericytes and chondrocytes-neurons co-cultures under non-inflammatory and pro-inflammatory conditions and with mechanical loading, simulating the conditions of a real joint. In addition, Reykjavik University presented their newly developed semi-supervised learning approach to label samplings that could not be attributed 100% to a degeneration category. A publication about this is planned. There are also some other publications in preparation, e.g. by OZ Biosciences on their work related to chondrocytes and macrophages. They will be made available on our website.

Although the meeting was held in a hybrid format, making our US partner UCLA get up at 3 o’clock at night and Portuguese partner i3S working on a bank holiday (sorry and thanks!), all partners (remote and on site) were actively engaged in discussions and providing valuable contributions.

The meeting was rounded up by a visit to the Christmas market in Homburg and a laboratory visit to the university hospitals’s Orthopaedics department.

A warm thank you to the entire team at Saarland University Hospital for having us!