Portuguese projects are part of a group of “66 research teams, bringing together 239 scientists, (who) will receive 684 million euros in synergy grants from the European Research Council (ERC), which support small groups of researchers working together on ambitious, high-risk, high-reward projects,” the institution announced in a statement.
The ERC reported that 712 proposals were submitted, with about one in 10 being selected.
One of the funded Portuguese projects is CenAGE, focused on aging and led by biochemist Elsa Logarinho from the Institute for Research and Innovation in Health at the University of Porto.
This project, which also involves two researchers from the Curie Institute in France, investigates the hypothesis that instability in repetitive DNA regions on chromosomes (cell structures containing genes) is a feature and/or cause of aging.
According to the University of Porto, the CenAGE project could pave the way for new therapies for age-associated diseases.
“Our goal is to produce innovative knowledge with a broad impact, from elucidating the fundamental mechanisms of aging to discovering new therapeutic strategies to enhance immunity in the elderly and mitigate diseases associated with advanced age,” said Elsa Logarinho, quoted in a university statement.
The other project developed in Portugal that received ERC funding is the RODIN project, focused on developing biomaterials for the bioengineering of human microtissues. It is led by scientists João Mano from the University of Aveiro and Nuno Araújo from the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lisbon, with collaboration from a researcher at Imperial College London.
According to the University of Aveiro, the RODIN project will investigate how cells can be the architects of future biomaterials.
The university explained in a statement that the central scientific challenge is “to understand how cells physically and biologically remodel their surrounding environment and to transform this knowledge into principles for creating more efficient biomaterials that better mimic living systems.”
“If successful, RODIN will open up a new way of engineering living systems, where materials and cells will no longer have a one-way relationship, where the material merely hosts the cells; instead, both will adapt to each other,” it added.
The projects funded by the ERC cover a wide range of areas, including research on using microbes to correct genetic diseases, investigations into the first microseconds after the birth of the Universe, new approaches to modeling crowd behavior by combining physical and social sciences, and studies on how mountain societies and ecosystems adapt to environmental and social changes.
