Ghent University shines with six prestigious ERC Advanced Grants

Ghent University projects selected for funding

The new grants will support cutting-edge research in a wide range of fields, from life sciences and physical sciences to social sciences and humanities.

Among Ghent’s recipients:

• Veronique Van Speybroeck makes history as the first to complete the ERC “hat-trick”, having now secured a Starting, Consolidator, and Advanced Grant with Ghent University as Host Institution.
• Clay Holroyd becomes the first at the university to win two Advanced Grants.
• Bruno De Geest and Martin Guilliams (VIB/UGent) are previous Consolidator Grant recipients.
• Dagmar D’hooghe and Klaas Vandepoele (VIB/UGent) celebrate their first-ever ERC grants.

This success not only highlights Ghent University’s world-class research environment but also reinforces its role as a powerhouse of innovation in Europe.

The winning projects

MATRACs: safe yet potent immunotherapy (Bruno De Geest)

Cancer immunotherapy represents a groundbreaking advancement in oncology, leveraging the immune system to combat malignancies. Unfortunately, only a limited fraction of cancer patients fully benefit from currently available immunotherapies, either due to inefficiencies in reaching the tumor or immune-related adverse effects. Hence, technologies that direct immune-mediated anti-tumor effects to the tumor microenvironment are highly relevant. However, the current paradigm for tumor-targeted delivery relies on identifying specific surface markers that are (over-)expressed on cancer cells. Since this remains unknown for most solid tumors, there is a clear unmet need for immunotherapeutic drugs that target tumors in an antigen-agnostic manner.

In his ERC project, Bruno De Geest will investigate an innovative approach called Marker-Agnostic Tumor-Anchoring Chimera (MATRAC) technology, designed to harness the universal microenvironmental features of solid tumors for the targeted delivery of immune-modulating therapies. By addressing critical gaps in current cancer immunotherapy, MATRAC technology holds the potential to enable safe yet potent immunotherapy for a broader range of patients. 

POLY-DESIGN: an advanced design of sustainable processes involving polymers (Dagmar D’hooge)

Polymers play an important role in our daily live, as evident by the many commodity and high-tech applications in which they appear. A societal and scientific goal is to make the production of these polymers more sustainable, and to increase their lifetime by incorporating multi-functionality.

In POLY-DESIGN, Dagmar R. D’hooge and his team will first apply advanced experimental and modeling tools to identify the most critical parameters along the polymer production chain. In a next step, the potential and sustainability level of the polymer application at hand is maximized. In this way, a multi- instead of monodirectional design of polymer production, modification and recycling processes will become feasible, embedding fundamental principles from chemistry, physics and engineering.

LegoLiver: (Re)constructing the liver, brick by brick (Martin Guilliams)

Martin Guilliams and his team at the VIB-UGent Center for Inflammation Research are using an ERC grant for their project called LegoLiver, which considers each liver cell as a building block and aims to understand how the individual liver cells multiply and reorganize themselves into a functional organ during liver regeneration and during liver growth in newborns.

The liver has an amazing ability to heal itself, but this ability has its limits. After major surgery to remove liver tumors, some patients can develop liver failure if the liver does not regenerate rapidly enough, which is fatal for one in three patients. Previous attempts to boost liver regeneration have focused on accelerating the growth of hepatocytes (one of the main liver cells), but these treatments have not been successful in the clinic.

The Guilliams team has discovered that the liver is made up of repeating structures consisting of four types of cells that work together. With this ERC grant, they will study why these structures can multiply so well in newborns but not in adults across different biological models. They will use advanced techniques like multiplexed imaging, single-cell analysis, and functional screens to find new ways to promote liver regeneration. Discovering methods to speed up liver regeneration could help cancer patients who currently can't have surgery and make it possible to perform more living-donor liver transplants, as surgeons would be able to use smaller pieces of the liver.

CONTROLMAP: a new, mathematically formal theory of cognitive effort (Clay Holroyd)

The sensation of cognitive effort is integral to everyday human experience, is a core construct in psychological theories of behavior, and contributes to multiple psychiatric disorders like ADHD and depression. However, despite decades of study the neural origin and functional purpose of cognitive effort remain poorly understood. This constitutes one of the most important outstanding questions in cognitive neuroscience and a major challenge to mental health research.

Recently, Clay Holroyd proposed a new, mathematically formal theory of cognitive effort that draws together concepts from dynamical systems analysis, linear control theory (LCT), artificial neural networks (ANNs), cognitive psychology and neurophysiology. The theory relates cognitive effort to the fact that brain neuroanatomy and neurophysiology render some neural states more energy-efficient than others. In particular, he introduced the concept of the "controllosphere," an energy-inefficient region of neural state space associated with high cognitive control, and proposed that cognitive effort serves to move the system state out of this high-energy region.

The goal of this project is to test the controllosphere theory. Dr. Holroyd will use ANNs to simulate human behavioral and neural data collected in tasks that require mental effort, and apply LCT to these models to make formal predictions about which neural representations are more or less effortful. He will then test these predictions using a wide variety of empirical techniques in a series of experiments with human participants. The establishment of a verified formal theory of cognitive effort will fill an important gap in the cognitive neuroscience of cognitive control, strongly impact clinical practice, and provide important insights for the development of novel artificial intelligence systems that balance computational function against energy use.

multiCODE: Unraveling the regulatory code of gene expression in plants (Klaas Vandepoele)

Plant biotechnology faces a significant hurdle in developing stress-resilient crops. Apart from identifying which genes are involved in stress tolerance, understanding how gene expression is precisely controlled within different plant tissues and in response to environmental cues is equally important. While we know that regulatory DNA sequences and transcription factor proteins are key players in these processes, the sheer complexity and combinatorial nature of this "regulatory code" make it incredibly difficult to predict and engineer specific gene expression.

This is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes into play as a crucial tool. The "multiCODE" project of Klaas Vandepoele at the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology highlights the transformative potential of AI in deciphering this complex regulatory code. By integrating single-cell genomics with AI, researchers can analyze vast amounts of high-resolution gene expression data. This allows AI models to not only predict gene expression in specific contexts, like under drought stress, but also to simultaneously identify the underlying regulatory DNA sequences and their organizational principles.

The importance of AI lies in its ability to handle the "big data" problem inherent in genomics and to extract meaningful, non-obvious patterns that would be impossible for humans to discern. “Explainable AI, in particular, offers the advantage of transparency, allowing researchers to understand why the AI makes certain predictions, enabling new biological insights”, Klaas explains.

These predictive models will then be validated through experimental approaches, including synthetic promoter engineering, which allows for high-throughput testing of newly identified regulatory elements in plants. Ultimately, by combining AI's analytical power with advanced experimental validation,  the researchers believe they can further unlock the secrets of gene regulation and eventually design novel synthetic promoters that precisely control gene expression. This capability is a monumental step towards engineering plants with enhanced stress resilience, directly contributing to global food security in a changing climate.

TIME: Get track of time for all events from the nano- to the crystal particle level in nanoporous materials (Veronique Van Speybroeck)

With the TIME project, Veronique Van Speybroeck has the ambition to fully unlock the time dimension as a powerful design parameter for next-generation nanoporous materials important for catalysis, separation and sensing. Showcase applications include catalysts that convert CO₂ into valuable chemicals, or materials capable of performing highly selective and energy-efficient separations. 

When a feed of molecules is sent over a nanoporous solid, they undergo a fascinating journey characterized by various events like adsorption, diffusion, reaction.  Eventually after having spent some time in the material, they escape from the lattice either in transformed or changed form.  All the sketched events, are characterized by vastly different length and time scales varying from the picosecond to the second/hours and the nano- to the micrometre.  Length and time phenomena are deeply intertwined, any change made on the nanometre scale impacts the further time behaviour of the molecules.

Today we lack knowledge on all time aspects of such a molecular trajectory. Hence we can not use time as a control parameter to steer the functionality of nanoporous materials.

The TIME project proposes a paradigm shift and aims to fully grasp the time dimension of a molecular trajectory from the nano- to the crystal particle level.  The ambition is to obtain kinetics and time information for all events from the nano- to the mesoscale with quantum accuracy and set up overall reaction/diffusion models for the crystal particle. Fundamentally new methods will be developed coupling machine learning potentials, reaction path discovery and advanced kinetic models.

The dream is to follow in time what happens with a feed of molecules during a real catalytic or separation experiment. The researchers want to obtain full control of time, predict how long molecules reside in the material and discover how the catalyst evolves in time.  This will lead to new intriguing design principles, where we can selectively capture molecules or amplify catalytic conversion in certain time windows.  Eventually they aim to fully control the activity, lifetime and evolution of a catalyst in space and time.  

ERC Advanced Grants 2024

Out of 281 top-tier researchers across Europe selected for this year’s Advanced Grants, six are affiliated with Ghent University—two of whom are also connected to VIB. These grants are among the most prestigious and competitive in the EU, supporting visionary projects that have the potential to spark major scientific breakthroughs.

Ghent University continues to lead the way in Belgium and ranks fifth in Europe for ERC funding acquisition. With a success rate of 44.5%, the university has quadrupled the European average of 11%, underscoring its research excellence and strategic strength.

The ERC Advanced Grants, part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, will distribute nearly €721 million in total funding to support groundbreaking research across the continent.

About the ERC

The ERC, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe. The ERC offers four core grant schemes: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants and Synergy Grants. With its additional Proof of Concept Grant scheme, the ERC helps grantees to bridge the gap between their pioneering research and early phases of its commercialisation.

“Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research, and Innovation, said: ‘These ERC grants are our commitment to making Europe the world’s hub for excellent research. By supporting projects that have the potential to redefine whole fields, we are not just investing in science but in the future prosperity and resilience of our continent. In the next competition rounds, scientists moving to Europe will receive even greater support in setting up their labs and research teams here. This is part of our “Choose Europe for Science” initiative, designed to attract and retain the world’s top scientists.”

Researchers within and outside of Ghent University who wish to apply for an ERC Grant with our university as host institution, can contact the EU Team for advice and support.

• More about ERC Grants
• ERC grant holders at Ghent University

Contact

EU-team UGent, eu-team@ugent.be