Three researchers from the BIST Community have been awarded 2026 ERC Advanced Grants:
• Prof. Luis Serrano (CRG) leads the project SafeDelivery, aiming to develop AI-designed proteins to fight lung cancer from within.
• Prof. Eduard Batlle (IRB Barcelona) heads project Plastic_CRC, which aims to block metastatic colorectal cancer’s ability to evade treatment.
• Prof. Javier Rodríguez-Viejo (ICN2) will lead the project GLASSPIKE, to develop new brain-inspired electronic memories.
For both Luis Serrano and Eduard Batlle, the 2026 ERC Advanced Grant marks their fourth consecutive ERC grants. Their achievements are highlighted in a recent El País article.
BIST Community recipients of 2026 ERC Advanced Grants. From left to right: Luis Serrano (CRG), Eduard Battle (IRB Barcelona), and Javier Rodríguez-Viejo (ICN2).
Advanced Grants from the European Research Council (ERC) support established researchers who are recognised leaders in their fields. The grants fund ambitious, high-risk projects with the potential to open new research directions and generate transformative advances. They are among the most competitive and prestigious funding schemes in Europe for frontier research.
For both Luis Serrano and Eduard Batlle, the 2026 ERC Advanced Grant marks their fourth consecutive ERC research grants. Their achievements have been highlighted in a recent article in El País.
‘Living medicine’ and AI-designed proteins to fight lung cancer from within
Researchers at the BIST Community centre CRG in Barcelona will develop new methods that combine protein design software and generative AI to engineer safer, more effective drugs.
The anticancer drugs will be delivered by a bacterium commonly found in the human lung, which the team have rendered harmless and repurposed into a ‘living medicine’ that targets lung cancer.
The engineered bacterium will set up a drug factory directly inside the tumour, activating only in disease-stricken parts of the organ and destroying it from within. The precise delivery method will spare the rest of the body from possible side effects.
The project, SafeDelivery, will begin effective immediately thanks to an ERC Advanced Grant worth €3,323,826 over five years. The project is led by ICREA Research Professor Luis Serrano, group leader at the CRG.
“This is the fourth consecutive ERC Advanced Grant our group has been awarded, reflecting more than two decades of work in synthetic biology, artificial intelligence and protein design. We hope to make a serious dent in the cancer with the highest mortality rate in the world, as well as on other diseases which could benefit from the technology developed here,” says Serrano.
Learn more here.
Blocking metastatic colorectal cancer’s ability to evade treatment
One of the major hurdles in treating metastatic colorectal cancer is the ability of tumour cells to change state and adapt to therapies. Known as cellular plasticity, this phenomenon drives the emergence of resistance and limits the effectiveness of many available treatments.
To understand and block this process, Dr. Eduard Batlle, ICREA Research Professor, CIBERONC researcher, and head of the Colorectal Cancer Laboratory at IRB Barcelona, has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for the project Plastic_CRC: Targeting tumour cell plasticity in colorectal cancer. Funded with €2.5 M, the project will explore novel strategies to make tumours less diverse and, consequently, more vulnerable to treatment.
The project builds on recent discoveries by Prof. Batlle’s laboratory, which identified cellular plasticity as a key resistance mechanism in metastatic colorectal cancer. In a study published in Cancer Discovery, the team demonstrated that blocking the activity of the KRAS oncogene causes some tumour cells to change identity and acquire features similar to cancer stem cells, enabling them to survive treatment.
Leveraging these findings, the new ERC Advanced Grant will study the alternative cell states that tumours can adopt, as well as the molecular mechanisms that enable cellular plasticity. The ultimate goal is to develop combination therapies able to restrict the adaptive capacity of tumour cells and enhance treatment efficacy.
Learn more here.
Developing new brain-inspired electronic memories
Most electronic systems today rely on architectures that physically separate memory, where information is stored, from the processor, which performs calculations. This means that data must constantly be moved between the two, which increases energy consumption and creates a bottleneck for increasingly demanding applications, such as artificial intelligence.
The project GLASSPIKE, which will be led by Prof. Javier Rodríguez-Viejo, head of the ICN2/UAB Group Thermal Properties of Nanoscale Materials, proposes an alternative inspired by the brain, in which information storage and processing are integrated. To achieve this, the project will focus on a class of organic materials known as molecular glasses. The idea is to exploit their electrical properties to store information at multiple levels and generate electrical signals similar to those used by neurons.
GLASSPIKE will explore the potential of these materials to create memory systems that can store information at multiple levels without requiring a continuous energy supply. The key lies in the ability of these molecules to orient their internal electric charges, forming stable physical configurations that can be modified by small electrical and thermal signals. This would enable information to be stored beyond the traditional binary system of zeros and ones in microscopic structures suitable for future electronic devices.
In addition, the material naturally generates small electrical signals known as spikes when it changes from one configuration to another. These spikes are similar to the impulses that neurons use to communicate. This feature could lead to the development of devices that can store and process information simultaneously, which is one of the main objectives of neuromorphic computing, a field that seeks to emulate the way the nervous system operates.
Learn more here.
