Virginia Bruno, a Ph.D. candidate at University of Amsterdam, has received IFER funding for her project, "Human iPSCs and primary organoid-derived visceral pain-on-a-chip model to study Candida albicans pathogenesis in inflammatory bowel disease." Candida albicans, a common yeast in the gut, has been increasingly implicated in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and associated chronic pain, yet how it interacts with intestinal tissue and sensory neurons remains poorly understood. Current pain research relies almost entirely on animal models, which cause suffering and fail to capture the human experience of pain. Virginia is pioneering the world's first human-based "gut-pain-on-a-chip" model, combining patient-derived gut organoids, clinical fungal samples from IBD patients, and iPSC-derived human sensory neurons to directly study how gut microbes trigger visceral pain. This breakthrough Neuro-FunGuMI system not only replaces animal use in pain research but also provides a powerful new tool to uncover pain mechanisms and guide the development of more effective, humane therapies for IBD.