The ERC Proof of Concept Grant is awarded exclusively to Principal Investigators who have previously won an ERC grant. Its primary goal is to support the commercial and social innovation potential of ERC-funded research. “It takes courage and skill to take an idea from the lab into the world of business. The Proof of Concept grants announced today are designed to enable researchers to take this brave step and transform groundbreaking research into tangible innovations”, remarked Iliana Ivanova, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth. Maria Leptin, President of the European Research Council, further commented: “With the help of ERC Proof of Concept grants, our grantees can go one step further and test the market potential of their basic research projects”.
Additional information about the awardees in Portugal is listed below.
Oliveira-Maia Lab (CF)
Modifying Eating Behaviours in Obesity: From Brain Damage to Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation Techniques
When our eating habits change, it can harm our physical and mental health, and sometimes lead to being overweight or obese. Given that obesity is a significant global health issue and current treatments often lack long-term effectiveness or pose substantial risks, novel therapeutic approaches are essential.
Under the auspices of the ERC Starting Grant, Albino Oliveira-Maia’s team at the CF is investigating how our brains determine our eating habits. They are looking into how the brain responds after we eat, which influences our desire to seek more food. This research also involves understanding how signals between our gut and brain affect our eating behaviour.
“Another way to understand the brain’s role in our eating habits is to look at what happens when certain brain areas are damaged”, explains Rita Cavaglia, a researcher on the project. “We’ve used this method for understanding mental health disorders, and it might help us understand eating behaviours too. For instance, we’ve noticed that some brain injuries can change how a person’s weight is regulated”.
This raises questions about whether these injuries occur in specific parts of the brain. Gonçalo Cotovio, a member of the team, elaborates: ”We can use brain imaging techniques to see if certain brain areas or networks are linked to these changes in weight and eating habits. These techniques could also help us develop new treatment methods like transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a non-invasive way to stimulate the brain”.
“With this project, our goal is to find specific areas in the brain that we can influence using TMS to help control eating habits”, says João Duarte, another researcher on the team. “This approach will be guided by our understanding of how certain brain areas, especially those affected by injuries, are linked to changes in eating behaviour and weight management”.
The team plans to use TMS to target these specific areas in people with obesity. Oliveira-Maia concludes, “We are convinced that this project, made possible by the ERC Proof of Concept grant, will enhance our understanding of how obesity develops and foster the development of innovative therapeutic approaches for this widespread and significant health issue”.
Bio:
Albino Oliveira Maia completed a medical degree at Universidade do Porto, and a doctorate in neuroscience, developed at Duke University. Upon returning to Portugal, and while completing clinical training to become a psychiatrist, he was engaged in postdoctoral training at the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme and also completed a Master’s degree in public health at the Harvard School of Public Health, in Boston, where he trained in non-invasive brain stimulation. Albino is director of the Neuropsychiatry Unit at the Champalimaud Clinical Centre, Group Leader at Champalimaud Research, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at NOVA Medical School. The clinical unit he directs is specialised in mental health care for patients with cancer, as well as treatment resistant depression, obsessive compulsive disorder and transcranial magnetic stimulation. He leads research in these areas, as well in understanding determinants of reward-related feeding behaviours in the brain and the periphery. The methods used in his laboratory span from psychological and behavioural assessment in patients and healthy volunteers, to optogenetic stimulation of central and peripheral neurons in mice, and brain imaging in both species.
Silva Pereira Lab (ITQB NOVA)
SNAIL - High performance hydrophobic suberin nanoparticles for the generation of liquid-air biphasic droplets with application in food and therapeutics
Functional foods are under high demand due to their potential to promote health and prevent diseases. The incorporation of functional ingredients, e.g. probiotics and proteins, is being sought in various food industries for products like bread, milk and fruit juices. However, many of these functional ingredients – beneficial to health – are sensitive to the pH of acidic products, such as juices.
Encapsulation technologies, particularly the ones known as antibubbles, are a promising tool to increase the survival of ingredients in acidic conditions and in the stomach. Yet, their most used encapsulation material – silica – is not proper for human consumption. In her recently concluded ERC Consolidator Grant, MIMESIS, Cristina Silva Pereira and her team proposed an alternative: “We think Suberin, a hydrophobic biopolymer that nature uses to prevent moisture transport, could be used as the shell of liquid droplets, avoiding leaking and ensuring a long shelf-life”, she explains.
Suberin is present in the bark of cork trees or the peel of potatoes, among others. “The main use of cork is in making stoppers for wine bottles”, says James Yates, an expert in nanoparticle characterization who will control the size homogeneity of the samples produced. “The material has been scrutinised for years to ensure it does not spoil wine”. Therefore, its safety for human consumption has long been demonstrated. Meanwhile, Manuel Melo, responsible for feeding the experimental data on suberin into predictive models of plant polyesters for a view of the organisation of these systems, explains the main aim of this new project: “The next step is the integration of the plant derived biopolymer into the multi-billion dollar markets for encapsulated functional food and drugs”.
The team, led by Cristina Silva Pereira, also includes an industry collaborator: the company that developed the patented antibubbles technology. “Currently, there are no encapsulation technologies available that can protect sensitive healthy ingredients against low pH for the whole of the shelf-life of food products while still guaranteeing bioavailability of the ingredients”, explains the owner of the company, Albert Poortinga. With SNAIL, the frontier research results of MIMESIS will be one step closer to making the use of suberin a reality for the functional food industry.
The ITQB NOVA team is also part of the LS4Future Associated Laboratory.
Bio:
Cristina Silva Pereira coordinates a team of 18 in the Lab of Applied and Environmental Mycology at ITQB NOVA. She became a PI in 2008 – only four years after earning her PhD. Her team works on plant polyesters, with several partnership agreements with industry. The researcher won her first ERC, a Consolidator Grant in 2015, with the project MIMESIS - Development of biomaterials through mimesis of plant defensive interfaces to fight wound infections. The research developed within this project will now come closer to market through the new ERC PoC grant. Silva Pereira studied Applied Chemistry - Biotechnology at the NOVA Science and Technology School, and started her research career at the Instituto de Biologia Experimental e Tecnológica (iBET). During her PhD, she worked at ITQB, and at the John Innes Centre and the Institute of Food Research (UK). In the last five years, she published over 30 scientific articles in international journals. Currently, Silva Pereira is the co-coordinator of the Molecular Biosciences PhD Programme, and a member of the directive board of the postgraduate course StartUp Research Programme. She has also written and published poems and short stories as Cristina Maria da Costa – a hobby that strengthens her scientific creativity. She is the proud mother of an 11-year old boy.
Cecília Roque Lab (UCIBIO-NOVA FCT)
Non-invasive clinical diagnostics inspired by olfaction
Since Hippocrates' time, about 2400 years ago, smell has been used as evidence of disease. By employing modern bioengineering and artificial intelligence (AI) tools, Cecilia Roque’s team has been putting smell-inspired diagnostics on the map for future clinical diagnostics.
Within the scope of the ERC Starting Grant - SCENT, Roque’s team worked in the field of artificial olfaction and smell-inspired technologies such as the electronic nose. The initial SCENT grant has pioneered an innovative class of bio-based materials, for example using gelatin, which are sensitive to volatile compounds (odours) and other disease biomarkers released from the body. “The new materials change their properties in the presence of disease biomarkers, generating signals that are collected and then analysed by artificial intelligence tools”, explains Susana Palma, a team member of the project. These artificial nose systems find patterns of distinct biomarkers in complex biological samples, thus can be used to detect fingerprints associated with certain diseases.
Currently, most clinical diagnostic tools are still invasive, which means that they require the collection of blood or other body samples, often causing the patient stress, pain and discomfort. After developing the SCENT technologies, the team has been focusing on the technology and market validation of their olfaction-inspired technologies. Despite having numerous applications, “our aim is to validate SCENT technologies for fast and patient-compliant diagnostic tools, using body samples collected in a non-invasive manner, such as urine, as the source for disease diagnostics. We are also looking at clinical applications for which the current diagnostic tools are costly, lengthy or not-existent at all”, says Cecília Roque, PI of the research team.
The technology and market validation of Roque’s team is being made possible due to ERC funding with two Proof of Concept grants. The first ERC Proof of Concept grant, ENSURE, is focusing on the validation of the technology towards the follow-up of bladder cancer “as we aim to alleviate patients and doctors by reducing the number of invasive procedures”, adds team member Carina Esteves.
With the newly awarded ERC Proof of Concept grant, UNMASK, Roque’s team will validate the smell-inspired technologies for the diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, which affect a large portion of society with very high economic and societal burden. The research team will work closely with clinical collaborators from hospitals to validate the technological component of the project, and with the Italian team DayOne for business validation and development.
Bio:
Cecília Roque is an Associate Professor with Habilitation in Bioengineering and head of Biomolecular Engineering Lab at UCIBIO, School of Science and Technology, NOVA University of Lisbon. She is UCIBIO Director since February 2023.
Cecilia holds a degree in Chemical Engineering (Major in Biotechnology) and a PhD in Biotechnology from Instituto Superior Técnico. Cecília has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge and at the Catholic University of America, a Post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Biotechnology (University of Cambridge) and at INESC-MN (Lisbon, Portugal), and a Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge, University of Nantes, University of São Paulo, City University of New York and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Her research focuses on biomimetics merging chemistry, biotechnology and engineering, and her work has been merited with several national and international distinctions.
About the Proof of Concept Grant and the ERC
The Proof of Concept grant scheme, which falls under the European Union’s research and innovation programme, Horizon Europe, will support the development of findings from former or ongoing research projects. In total, 564 proposals were evaluated for the Proof of Concept call, and 240 projects were selected, resulting in a success rate of 43%. The new grantees are based in 20 different countries across Europe.
The ERC, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers across Europe of any nationality and age, and offers four core grant schemes: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants and Synergy Grants. With its additional Proof of Concept Grant scheme, the ERC helps grantees to bridge the gap between their pioneering research and early phases of its commercialisation. The ERC is led by an independent governing body, the Scientific Council. Since November 2021, Maria Leptin has been the President of the ERC. The overall ERC budget from 2021 to 2027 is more than €16 billion, as part of the Horizon Europe programme, under the responsibility of European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, Iliana Ivanova.
Text by Hedi Young, Editor and Science Writer of the Champalimaud Foundation's Communication, Events & Outreach Team in Partnership with the Communication Offices of ITQB and NOVA FCT.
