NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The European Union has awarded €5 million ($6.8 million) to fund over thirty proof-of-concept projects across Europe and in a broad range of fields, including life sciences research seeking to develop technologies toward commercialization.
The European Research Council provided up to €150,000 to each research project to help scientists push their pioneering "blue sky" basic science closer to the market.
This was the second round of funding awarded under the €10 million ERC Proof-of-Concept program, which has now supported a total of 67 grants.
This round of awards includes grants to develop a novel high-throughput tool to genotype human genome inversions for personalized medicine applications at the Autonoma University of Barcelona; a high-throughput real-time technology to characterize cell-mechanical properties at Technical University Dresden in Germany; a nanomechanical flow cytometer for cell prescreening at the Spanish National Research Council; technology to target BMP4 and BMPR1 (protein receptors) for imaging esophageal carcinoma at the University of Amsterdam's Academic Medical Center; and statistical network-based proteomics tools at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.