Hand Lobke a subject that interests her, and she’ll dig deep to learn everything about it. “I knew I wanted to work in the medical sector, and Biomedical Sciences teaches you about medicine and the human body all the way down to its molecular levels.” Lobke specialised in molecular diagnostics and worked during a gap year as a research assistant at the Pathology department of MUMC+, researching potential biomarkers for renal cell carcinoma. “I combined that with a part-time research function at a medical start-up that developed early-stage melanoma prognostic tests”.

After her master’s, Lobke started at Xyall, a MedTech company specialising in automated tissue dissection technology. “When tumor tissue is taken from a patient, it undergoes a series of steps until final diagnosis. Those steps are performed manually by pathologists, technicians and molecular diagnostics. This process is labour-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to error and contamination. Our company, Xyall, developed a solution to digitise and automate the tissue dissection workflow to help pathologists obtain more reliable molecular diagnostic test results.The technology combines a high degree of precision and reproducibility into a fully integrated solution, allowing for the accurate and efficient selection of samples for molecular analysis.