IBEC Principal Investigator Irene Marco Rius has been selected for the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant call to carry out her project ‘LIFETIME’. The project focuses on the study of individual cancer metabolism, which is crucial for less invasive early diagnosis and personalised treatments.
IBEC researcher Irene Marco Rius has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant, one of the most prestigious and competitive sources of funding in the European Union. It is a research grant from the European Research Council (ERC) aimed at supporting early-stage researchers and enabling them to carry out cutting-edge projects by setting up their own teams. 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.
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.
Irene Marco-Rius
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,’ says 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.
