ERC Synergy Grants
ERC Synergy Grant for AI-assisted Search for New Antibiotics
Professors Ivo Boneca, Mark Brönstrup, and Christophe Zimmer have been awarded one of the most prestigious European research prizes, an ERC Synergy Grant worth eleven million euros.
As announced by the ERC on 5 November 2024, a German-french team will receive a Synergy Grant worth nearly eleven million euros. The group is developing an AI-based solution to make the systematic search for new antibiotics significantly more efficient. It consists of Professors Ivo Boneca, Mark Brönstrup and Christophe Zimmer.
Professor Ivo Boneca heads the Biology and Genetics of the Bacterial Cell Wall Unit at the Institut Pasteur (CNRS/Inserm). His lab is a leader in the field of microbial physiology and has made seminal contributions to the study of bacterial cell wall biology, developing antibiotics and elucidating their modes of action. The team routinely uses high-throughput imaging, high-resolution mass spectrometry and bacterial mutants to identify new antibiotic targets.
Professor Mark Brönstrup heads the department “Chemical Biology” at Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig. He holds a professorship at Leibniz University in Hannover that is also associated to the research area "Novel Antibiotics" in the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF). His lab is a leader in the field of natural product chemistry and novel antibiotics. The team has expertise in antibiotic lead generation and optimization, rational design of drug conjugates, medicinal chemistry, and mode of action studies using bioanalytical methods.
Professor Christophe Zimmer heads the Chair “Machine Biophotonics” in the Rudolf Virchow Centre at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg. He is also affiliated with the Institut Pasteur in Paris, where he leads the “Imaging and Modelling” research unit. His lab is a leader in developing advanced microscopy and image analysis methods for biology. The team has long-standing expertise in developing optical and computational methods for single molecule localization microscopy (SMLM), high-throughput imaging, single molecule RNA-FISH, and adapting deep learning methods to address biological questions.
ERC Synergy Grant for immunotherapy for liver metastases 2023
An international team from the field of immunology has been awarded one of the most highly endowed research grants in the EU: the ERC Synergy Grant. Its aim is to explore new possibilities for immunotherapy of liver metastases.
The four scientists conduct research in Italy, France and Germany. They are each considered leaders in their field.
Valeria Fumagalli is an expert in liver immunology and works with tissue samples from tumor patients at the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan.
Florent Ginhoux from the Gustave Roussy Cancer Campus in Paris is an expert in the biology of myeloid cells and how they function in healthy and diseased tissue.
Georg Gasteiger's work focuses on lymphocytes of the innate immune system, including so-called "natural killer" or NK cells, and how they develop and function in the different tissues of the body.
Eric Vivier from the Centre d'Immunologie in Marseille-Luminy has already developed several molecules with which these cells can be activated to fight tumor cells - and successfully brought them into clinical trials on patients.
Based on this experience, the team wants to develop new approaches to immunotherapy.
Eleven million euros for better images of functioning and pathologically altered nerve cells 2020
The researchers want to understand how key components of synapses are organized in healthy and diseased organisms. They want to develop standardized diagnostic tests that are suitable for routine examinations of tissue samples. And they want to keep their high-resolution microscopy techniques so simple that they can be used in any biomedical laboratory.
In order to make individual synapse proteins visible, the scientists want to improve the most powerful microscopy techniques to date so that images with a resolution of one to five nanometers are possible. Currently, “only” 20 to 30 nanometers can be achieved; individual proteins are three to seven nanometers in size.
In the project, the team wants to combine expansion microscopy (ExM) with the single-molecule-sensitive super-resolution microscopy method dSTORM in order to significantly improve the microscopic resolution.
The three experts Edward Stuart Boyden, Markus Sauer and Silvio Rizzolinun have successfully acquired funding for their project: The European Research Council (ERC) is supporting their “Ultraresolution” project with an ERC Synergy Grant worth eleven million euros. Around 4.4 million of the funding will go to JMU.
Professor Markus Sauer
The expert in super-resolution microscopy researches and teaches at the Biocenter of Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU)
Professors Silvio Rizzoli
A synapse physiologist from the Institute of Neuro- and Sensory Physiology at the University Medical Center Göttingen
Edward S. Boyden
Physicist and biotechnologist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
