The ERC awards a second Advanced Grant to Luis Liz-Marzán, scientific director of CIC biomaGUNE

The European Research Council, ERC has awarded a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant to Luis Liz-Marzán, Ikerbasque Professor and Scientific Director of CIC biomaGUNE. The project entitled “Four-Dimensional Monitoring of Tumour Growth by Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering” will be funded with 2.4 million Euro during the next five years.

The grants awarded by the European Research Council are the most prestigious ones at the European level. According to the ERC, the candidates should be “exceptional leaders in terms of originality and significance of their research contributions”. This means that only those researchers who are leaders in their respective research fields present proposals to this call. Only one out of ten submitted proposals is finally selected.

The project led by Liz-Marzán will deal with the design of materials and methods that allow a study in real time of tumor growth under controlled environments, built from purposely designed scaffolds. The use of novel optical methods is proposed to overcome the limitations of currently used techniques, in particular related to the ability of observing deeper regions in the tissue. The proposed technique is called surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS), and it can analyze a wide variety of substances with very low spatial resolution, even at extremely low concentrations. The efficacy of SERS is based on the use of gold nanoparticles, which alter the way in which light is scattered by selected molecules, thereby facilitating their identification.

Liz-Marzán’s laboratory at CIC biomaGUNE possesses extensive experience in the design of such nanoparticles and their application to SERS detection. This expertise allowed them to study communication between bacteria in an earlier ERC Advanced Grant “Development of plasmonic sensors to understand the relationship between bacteria and eukaryotic cells”.

In the new project, this technique is proposed to study tumor growth, through the identification of certain distinctive elements, such as characteristic biomarkers, or changes in pH and temperature. All this will be possible thanks to a novel design of the materials comprising the scaffolds in which tumors will be grown, since they will carry SERS sensors that will allow spatial and temporal resolutions that are not possible with currently available methods. Although this technique can be applied to the study of different diseases, special attention will be paid to breast cancer and melanoma, because they present features that are more suitable for optical methods.

An additional advantage of the proposed method is that it will allow fundamental studies of tumor growth, with no need to use animal experimentation. The researchers expect that the generated knowledge will facilitate the identification of new drugs that are more effective against cancer and avoid side effects of current chemotherapy.

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