About us

Introduction
RC-SML was established in the beginning of 2021 as a new Research Center in the MET faculty at Tampere University. This RC is by far the largest consisting 16 group leaders, PIs, together with personnel around 250 members. The center is led by Adj. Prof Susanna Narkilahti and Prof Jonathan Massera (vice-leader) and board members include Prof Katriina Aalto-Setälä and Associate Prof Veikko Sariola. The PI’s have long history for joint, collaborative works which form a basis for the operations of this RC. As this RC brings together expertise from various areas in cell biology, clinical work, and engineering, it shows elegantly the success in conducting multidisciplinary research across the boundaries of the fields of science in line with the university strategy. This is further evident by the prestigious Centre of Excellent status (2018-2025) given by Academy of Finland to our Body-on-Chip Research (https://research.tuni.fi/coeboc/) which is operated by 6 of our RC PI’s.
We profile ourselves to the areas of stem cell-based therapies, medical devices and organ-on-chip devices and various application areas arising from them. Specifically, we aim to replace animal studies with personalized human cell-based models to renew the R&D paradigm of medical devices and therapies. Particularly, we focus on the fields of ophthalmology, neurology, cardiology, oral and maxillofacial prosthetics and orthopedics.
Our mission is to improve the quality of life of people and patients. We achieve our mission with a strategy of developing innovative medical diagnostics, studying cellular mechanisms to discover novel drug targets, and researching novel treatment methods together with our collaborators. Composedly, these will improve the quality of patient’s life and reduce morbidity and mortality. Our RC also works actively in disease prevention and health enhancement. In short, our RC aims at a positive influence on the overall health in the society.

The high-quality research is conducted by 16 research groups (presented in an alphabetical order).