The awards, announced today, are part of the EU’s Horizon Europe Programme and are worth nearly €652 million. They are designed to provide leading senior researchers with the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs.
Professor Paula Mendes, of the University’s School of Chemical Engineering, received her grant for a project called GLYCANREAD, which will investigate new approaches to glycan recognition and detection.
Sugar chains, known as glycans, perform a vast array of biological functions and play key roles in various physiological and pathological events in the human body. Glycans are a rich source of biomarkers for many diseases, including neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases, hereditary disorders, immune deficiencies, and cancer.
While glycans play such essential roles, knowledge about their function in health and disease as well as their clinical use as biomarkers have been hampered by lack of specific and sensitive tools for their recognition and detection.
The GLYCANREAD project will take a multi-disciplinary approach to provide transformative technical advances in our ability to qualitatively and quantitatively analyze glycans.
Professor Mendes said: I am absolutely delighted and honored to have been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant. It builds on the work my lab has been leading in the field of the recognition and detection of glycans. Glycans are known to change in many diseases but at the moment we do not have the specific and selective tools for glycan recognition and detection. The GLYCANREAD project aims to transform the field of glycan analysis and this will have a huge impact on the understanding and diagnosis of many devastating human diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular and neurogenerative diseases.
President of the European Research Council Professor Maria Leptin said: Congratulations to the 255 researchers who will receive grants to follow their scientific instinct in this new funding round. I am particularly happy to see more mid-career scientists amongst the Advanced Grant winners this time. I hope that it will encourage more researchers at this career stage to apply for these grants.
