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How a four-year-old boy connects healthcare, biomedical research and undergraduate education

Patients with unknown disease can serve as an educational catalyst in biomedical sciences to create strong synergy between healthcare, research and undergraduate education, with the goal of fostering translational medicine and helping patients.

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Fig. 1: The patient with his father (right) and the medical doctors/(clinician-)scientists (left) sitting in the lecture hall together with 96 biomedical students.
Fig. 2

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Acknowledgements

We thank the patient, his parents and family, and all (clinician-)scientists, medical doctors and students who participated in the Pathology course. We acknowledge the University Medical Centre Utrecht, the Faculty of Medicine, and Utrecht University for their support. Finally, we thank M. Kluijtmans (Utrecht University) for critical reading of this manuscript.

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Correspondence to Niels Bovenschen.

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Drost, R.H., Dictus, W.J.A.G., Prakken, B.J. et al. How a four-year-old boy connects healthcare, biomedical research and undergraduate education. Nat Biotechnol 37, 1092–1095 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-019-0245-5

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