Dr van Balkom is an assistant professor in the Dept of Nephrology and Hypertension, UMC Utrecht, The Netherlands, which is part of the Regenerative Medicine Center Utrecht. His research interest lies in the exploration of extracellular vesicle (EV) for regenerative approaches, applied in the setting of (chronic) kidney disease. He particularly focusses on animal-free models to study the potential application of EVs for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes, and is therefore employing multi-organ-on-a-chip (disease) models, in which different human organ models are combined to recapitulated the (patho-)physiological interactions.