Dr. Noelia Ferruz (CRG) and Dr. Irene Marco Rius (IBEC) each receive €1.5 Million ERC Starting Grants for their frontier research projects.
BIST Community researchers Dr. Noelia Ferruz (left) and Dr. Irene Marco Rius (right)
This week the European Research Council (ERC) announced the 494 projects that will be funded by the latest Starting Grant round. BIST Community researchers Noelia Ferruz and Irene Marco Rius are among the 14.2% successful candidates, selected from 3,474 applications received in this highly competitive call.
ATHENA, a generative artificial intelligence to design proteins
Dr. Noelia Ferruz, who joined the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) as a group leader this summer, has embarked on an ambitious project to develop ATHENA, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) model designed to create proteins with custom properties that do not exist in nature.
ATHENA, which will be funded with €1.5 million from the ERC, aims to revolutionize the field of protein design by enabling the creation of novel proteins with capabilities beyond natural evolution. The AI will be trained using various types of protein data, including sequences, three-dimensional structures, dynamics, and functions. This approach could lead to proteins that address global challenges, such as climate change and environmental pollution. For instance, ATHENA could design enzymes to sequester carbon dioxide or detect harmful pollutants like BPA.
Dr. Ferruz explains, “Though nature’s toolkit is vast and astounding, it doesn’t always provide the precise solutions we need. We want to build tools that can make these proteins a reality, providing new ways to tackle long-elusive problems.” ATHENA will employ reinforcement learning to refine its designs, ensuring continuous improvement through iterative testing and feedback.
LIFETIME, metabolomics for paediatric liver cancer detection and therapy assessment
Dr. Irene Marco Rius, who joined the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) as a Junior Group Leader in early 2021, thanks to the “la Caixa” Foundation BIST Chemical Biology Programme, will use ERC funding to expand her research towards the most common form of liver cancer in children, the hepatoblastoma. The new project, named LIFETIME, aims to track how different treatments affect tumour metabolism over time. Mouse models of different types of hepatoblastoma will be studied and compared with cell cultures of the same tumours in organ-on-a-chip devices.
If successful, the platform’s scalability will allow the assessment of animal models and cell cultures to be linked to magnetic resonance imaging used in clinical practice, which could improve the diagnosis and treatment of this type of cancer.
“We hope that LIFETIME will allow us to define new biomarkers for hepatoblastoma and to achieve revolutionary results in metabolomic analysis, enabling non-invasive diagnosis and personalised treatment,” says Dr. Marco Rius.
Learn more about ATHENA project at CRG’s website
Learn more about LIFETIME project at IBEC’s website
