On Friday, 26 April 2019, the 2nd edition of the Pairing Scheme organized by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR), in which researcher are paired with Luxembourg Members of Parliament (MPs) was launched. On this occasion the 13 participating MPs visited the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) as part of their stay at the Belval research campus.
The aim of the Pairing Scheme is that researchers and MPs get to know each other and develop a better understanding of respective work environments. This also includes seeing how research is done in the laboratories. Prof. Paul Wilmes, principal investigator at the LCSB, who had participated in the 1st edition of the pairing scheme, welcomed the group of visitors in the Biotech 1 building and gave an overview of the strategy and activities of the University of Luxembourg and the LCSB.
The MPs then had the chance to visit his laboratory and learn about the use of HuMiX, a gut-on-a-chip model, in colon cancer research. The group had recently discovered that a certain combination of diet and microbes has an inhibitory effect on cancer progression.
In a next step, researchers will get to discover how the Luxembourg parliamentary system works and what the daily life of an MP looks like. “Evidence matters in political decision making. The Pairing Scheme is a very important initiative to foster the exchange between science and politics to ultimately find new ways on how to support policy making with the latest scientific results,” concludes Prof. Paul Wilmes.
Copyright for pictures: © Fond National de la Recherche