ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The goal of this project is to develop the proof of concept for a novel injection-molding design workflow, making mold design accessible to a new, semi-professional user base of designers, engineers, and artists. It will provide a more more cost-efficient way of bringing lower-volume and customized products to the market. Recently, the related Materializable ERC Starting Grant has lead to the invention of novel computational tools for mold design, where the decomposition of a general 3D shape into moldable parts - together with the generation of the corresponding mold geometry - is performed fully automatically. The three main advantages of our method are (i) a drastic reduction of the time requirements of mold design (from hours/days down to minutes) and (ii) the discovery of highly efficient shape decompositions with curved part boundaries, which are very hard to design manually due to their counterintuitive nature. Furthermore, our method allows (iii) a non-expert to refine the aesthetics of the decomposition without being aware of the specifics of molding; these are enforced in the background. In order to evaluate the industrial and commercial potential of this invention, we propose the development of a software prototype for automatized mold design.

149 829 €

Start date: 2019-06-01, End date: 2020-11-30

Personalized medicine aspires to provide optimal therapy in real-time during patient treatment, however current methodology falls short to deliver this in a robust manner. With this in mind, we invented a method for the screening of thousands of drug responses in small samples of an individual’s peripheral blood by automated microscopy and single-cell image analysis. We termed this method pharmacoscopy. In the course of carrying out the i-FIVE ERC grant project plan, we began screening for novel anti-viral or immune modulating drugs. In the quest to increase the physiological relevance of our screening settings, we investigated the possibility of using peripheral blood cells or bone marrow from individuals. We have thus far been able to show that the approach allows for the screening of anti-inflammatory properties of compounds, and to score for distinct sub-population specific cell cytotoxicity profiles of clinical anti-neoplastic agents through the tracking of fluorescent antibodies and probes. Moreover, we have been able to show that the approach empowers the therapeutic decision-making capability of hema-oncologists in a concrete clinical setting using primary myelofibrosis and lymphoma as test diseases. With funding from this grant, we intend to obtain further clinical data through retrospective trials, and incorporate the results into an information package attractive enough to draw the attention of potential investors. We have secured the intellectual property rights and have assembled the know-how required to enable commercialization efforts. With the unique image-based single cell analysis of human liquid tissues, we believe that chemos has the potential to develop into a service that enables and advances personalized medicine and drug discovery for a broad spectrum of hematological disorders.

146 668 €

Start date: 2016-10-01, End date: 2017-09-30

There is currently no high-throughput method to efficiently identify and optimize nanoparticle delivery of therapeutic relevant cargo such as drugs or mRNA before progression through costly clinical development. This is in stark contrast to the situation for small molecules and antibodies, where screening technologies such as high-throughput small molecule screening and phage display in the last decades have proven very successful to aid and drive drug discovery and development. Our project ‘CodeSphere’ seeks to develop a method for DNA-tagging of nanoparticles to efficiently optimize nanoparticles on several parameters in parallel from libraries which - in time - will be at least 1.000-10.000 larger than the capability of current state-of-the-art screening methods. The project will initially work towards the generation of a library of > 1.000 different T cell targeted liposomal nanoparticles containing mRNA encoding anti-cancer proteins. This library of DNA-tagged nanoparticles will be screened in “one-pot” in human blood to identify nanoparticles with optimal characteristics to efficiently deliver mRNA to specific cell populations. Through such a technology, one could gain knowledge on which particle design is most optimal including stability in blood, ‘stealth’ evasion of the immune system, optimal systemic circulation time, efficiency in reaching the target tissue (e.g. cancer lesion) and efficiency in delivering the drug or other cargo. The technology can be applied to whole blood preparations, primary cells, cell lines, and even as in vivo screening in whole organisms.

149 951 €

Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2019-02-28

In 2013 I was awarded an ERC consolidator grant to pursue a novel cancer targeting concept using a recombinant malaria protein. As an ERC grantee I verified the malaria protein (rVAR2) binds to this distinct cancer expressed molecule (CSA) in hundreds of cancer cell lines and thousands of tissue biopsies. Our research demonstrate a pivotal role of CSA in cancer cell migration and thus in the formation of metastasis. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are cancer cells escaping the primary tumor with the capacity to settle and form a metastasis in distant organs. Isolation of CTC is thus a very attractive non-invasive measure of the stage of a given cancer and provides the opportunity to do direct phenotypic analyses. However CTCs are in most cases very rare (10 cells pr 1ml blood) and does not uniformly distinguish themselves from normal blood cells. Our preliminary data show that rVAR2 very effectively can be used to isolate CTCs from diverse types of cancer with unprecedented specificity and sensitivity. Such a tool could have wide impact for cancer patients because it could sharpen diagnosis, increase prognostic ability, monitor drug efficacy and facilitate molecular characterization of individual cancers with implications for personalized medicine and basic cancer research. The aim of the ERC PoC project is to A) prepare for establishment of a separate company with a strategic product plan and B) further develop and validate the methodology enabling diagnosis, prognosis and guide treatment.

149 375 €

Start date: 2018-02-01, End date: 2019-01-31