ERC awarded 4 Portuguese projects Proof of Concept Grants

The European Research Council ( ERC) today announced the results of the Call Proof of Concept Grantsin which 4 projects by Portuguese researchers were selected. Each project will receive funding of around 150,000 euros, which translates into a total of 600,000 euros allocated to Portuguese research in this Call.

The ERC approved a total of 166 projects that applied for this edition of the Call for Proof of Concept Grants, corresponding to around 25 million euros of investment in European science, of which Portuguese researchers managed to capture 2.4% of the available funding.

The Portuguese researchers who had their projects approved for funding by the ERC, in the Proof of Concept Grants, were: Manuela Gomes from the Biomaterials, Biodegradables and Biomimetics Research Institute (3B's) at the University of Minho, with the project: "BioCHIPS - Biofabricated microfluidcs CHIPS based on self assembling of CNCs to recreate the hierarchical fibrillar structure of human tissues ECM"; Elvira Fortunato from the Materials Research Center (CENIMAT-i3N) at the New University of Lisbon, with the project: "From Forest to Electronics: Green Graphene"; João Barata from the Institute of Molecular Medicine (iMM) at the University of Lisbon, with the project "A microRNA-regulated cell death-inducing gene therapy for T-cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia"; and Cecília Roque from the Applied Biomolecular Sciences Unit - Institute for Health and Bioeconomics (UCIBIO - i4HB), with the project "Non-invasive follow-up of urinary tract cancers".

The Proof of Concept Grants are an extension of the financial support granted to projects previously selected for one of the ERC's other Research Studentships , which aims to facilitate the exploitation of the commercial and social innovation potential of scientific research by providing the means to carry out additional work on exploring and testing ideas and establishing partnerships with a view to enabling the passage of research results to their concrete application.

Overall, 54% of the European projects selected come from the physical sciences and engineering, around a third work in the life sciences, and 11% in the social sciences and humanities. Also noteworthy is the fact that 48 of the principal investigators selected are women.

In the words of the president of the ERC, Maria Leptin, "frontier research has the capacity to generate discoveries that can be quickly put into practice", and "applied research is not possible without the basic research that feeds it", which is why the Proof of Concept Grants, in association with the other Studentships of the Horizon Europe program, are fundamental to fostering the development and applicability of innovative scientific research in new areas and new themes. In Portugal, FCT is the coordinator of support to the scientific community for the Horizon Europe program, renewed last year for the 2021-2027 period, through Delegates and National Contact Points (NPCs).