Ireland bags four ERC grants to further medical research

With this funding, European researchers can test how their scientific work could impact society.

Four Irish-based researchers have won Proof of Concept grants from the European Research Council (ERC).

Funding for the first funding round this year is worth more than €27m, and is divided between 182 researchers with ideas that show potential for commercial or societal impact. Each individual grant is worth €150,000.

Some of the chosen ideas include developing 3D-printed ‘bio-inspired’ electronics, a tool to help doctors protect vital parts of the brain during surgery, and an advanced ready-made breast cancer vaccine.

University College Dublin (UCD) researcher Prof Niamh Nowlan received ERC funding to further her work around new treatments for a broad range of paediatric growth disorders.

Nowlan is a professor of biomedical engineering at the UCD School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and a fellow of the UCD Conway Institute.

Her project, called ‘Grow-Reg’, will attempt to identify specific cell surface markers that aid in the growth of children’s bones, to help develop treatments designed to speed up or slow down growth of one or more bones without systemic drugs or surgeries.

“Advancing basic research closer to patients (especially babies and children) is hugely rewarding and we are excited to get started,” said Nowlan. Grow-Reg builds on a previous ERC-funded project led by Nowlan.

“By creating the foundation for a targeted delivery platform capable of modulating growth plate activity with high anatomical precision, we hope to ultimately enable new treatments for a broad range of paediatric growth disorders, reduce reliance on invasive surgery, and improve the safety and specificity of existing biologic therapies,” she said.

Meanwhile, two University of Galway research projects also succeeded in receiving Proof of Concept grants. Led by systems biomedicine professor Ines Thiele, ‘iChatRD’ aims to develop a user-centred clinical decision support system to diagnose rare and inherited metabolic diseases.

“When exploring avenues for translating our fundamental research on digital metabolic twins into patient-focused applications, we kept encountering a major challenge. The richest clinical information exists as free text – the language of a human, not of a computer,” Thiele said.

“iChatRD bridges this gap by enabling metabolic modelling and natural language work together to suggest candidate diagnoses for inherited metabolic diseases.

“The ERC Proof of Concept grant now helps us take iChatRD into the real world by working directly with clinicians to help shorten the diagnostic odyssey that may burden rare disease patients for years.”

The second Galway project, called ‘GelEV’, will focus on developing technology that could improve regenerative medicine delivery to injured tissue sites. Led by Meadhbh Brennan, the project is engineering a hyaluronic acid hydrogel for better delivery to extracellular vesicles.

University of Limerick also bagged a grant win with a project called ‘Eve Heals’ that hopes to heal diseases affecting the skin using in-vitro engineered living substitutes. The project is led by Dimitrios Zevgolis, who also works across institutes at UCD.

“Many of today’s innovations begin with a researcher asking a fundamental question. These 182 projects show that curiosity-driven science and real-world impact go hand-in-hand,” said Ekaterina Zaharieva, the European commissioner for start-ups, research and innovation.

“With Proof of Concept funding, ERC researchers can test how their discoveries could become new treatments, technologies, services or solutions that benefit people across Europe.”

2026’s first Proof of Concept round invited 15pc more proposals than a year ago, the ERC said. Applications for the second round are open, with a September deadline.

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