22/01/2024

The Lab Head, Cristina Silva Pereira, from the ITQB NOVA, an LS4FUTURE partner, was awarded the Proof-of-Concept Grant by the European Research Council (ERC – PoC). This 150K€ funding will allow the Lad of Applied and Environmental Mycology to continue developing their research work on encapsulating technologies for food and therapeutics applications.

This grant will allow to continue the amazing research work developed during the ERC Consolidator Grant, where Cristina Silva Pereira and her team proposed that a plan-derived biopolymer, suberin, could have encapsulating properties and potentially be used to protect functional ingredients, such as probiotics or proteins, in food and biopharmaceutical products.

Other ITQB NOVA members will also join this project. The collaborator, James Yates, will provide details on the characterization of this nanoparticle, and the PI, Manuel Melo, will lead the computational analysis and predictive models of plant polyesters. Furthermore, this project will count with the collaboration of Bether Encapsulates, a biotech company that developed the patented anti-bubble technology.

The ERC-PoC Grant aims to support the innovation potential of ERC-funded frontier research projects and, therefore, can only be awarded to PIs whose ERC grant has previously been funded. The LS4FUTURE – ITQB NOVA PI Cristina Silva Pereira is one of the three Portuguese PIs awarded this prominent grant.