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Researcher Irene Marco Rius. Image / IBEC.
 06.09.2024

Researcher Irene Marco Rius awarded prestigious European ERC Starting Grant

Irene Marco Rius, principal investigator at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), based in the Barcelona Science Park, has been selected for the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant call to carry out her project ‘LIFETIME’, focuses on the study of individual cancer metabolism, which is crucial for less invasive early diagnosis and personalised treatments.

The Starting Grants from the European Research Council (ERC) are one of the most prestigious and competitive sources of funding in the European Union. ERC grants help researchers at the beginning of their careers to launch their own projects, form their teams and pursue their most promising ideas. Each project receives 1.5 million euros over five years.

Marco Rius is one of a select 14.2% of successful candidates from across Europe out of the 3,474 applications received for this call.

In early 2021, Marco Rius joined IBEC as junior group leader of the Molecular Imaging for Precision Medicine group, through the Chemical Biology Research Programme of Fundació ‘la Caixa’ and the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST).

The project to be developed thanks to the new funding is called LIFETIME: Lifetime Metabolomics for Paediatric Liver Cancer Detection and Therapeutic Evaluation using Organ-on-a-Chip Platforms.

The research will focus specifically on hepatoblastoma, the most common form of liver cancer in children. 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 scalability of the platform 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,’ explains Irene Marco Rius.

In the long term, the platform could also help evaluate the benefits and limitations of organ-on-a-chip technology in cancer research and other aggressive diseases.

» Link to the news: IBEC website[+]