With this funding, ERC researchers can explore how their scientific work can affect society.
Four Irish researchers have won Proof of Concept grants from the European Research Council (ERC).
This year’s first round of funding is worth more than 27 million euros, and has been divided among 182 researchers with ideas that show the possibility of commercial or social impact. Each grant is worth €150,000.
Some of the ideas include making 3D-printed “bio-inspired” electronics, a tool to help doctors protect important parts of the brain during surgery, or a vaccine for breast cancer that is already at an advanced stage.
University College Dublin (UCD) researcher Prof Niamh Nowlan is one of the winners, who received ERC funding to further her work on new treatments for a range of childhood developmental disorders.
Nowlan is a professor of biomedical engineering in the UCD School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and a fellow of the UCD Conway Institute.
His project, called ‘Grow-Reg’, will try to identify specific cell signals that help the growth of children’s bones to help develop treatments designed to accelerate or slow down the growth of one or more bones without systemic drugs or surgery.
“Conducting basic research in close proximity to patients (especially children and infants), is very rewarding and we are very excited to get started,” said Nowlan. Grow-Red builds on a previous ERC-funded project led by Nowlan.
“By building the foundation for a targeted delivery platform capable of modulating growth plate function with high anatomical precision, we hope to ultimately enable new treatments for a wide range of pediatric developmental disorders, reduce reliance on invasive surgery and improve the safety and specificity of existing biologic therapies.”
Meanwhile, two researchers from the University of Galway were also successful in obtaining Proof of Concept grants. Led by systems biomedicine professor Ines Theile, ‘iChatRD’ aims to develop a user-centered clinical decision support system for the diagnosis of rare and inherited metabolic diseases.
“When exploring ways to translate our basic digital metabolic twin research into patient-centered applications, we kept encountering a major challenge: the richest clinical information exists as free text — human language, not computer language,” Theile said.
“ChatRD closes this gap, by allowing metabolic modeling and natural language to work together to suggest diagnoses for people to be screened for inherited diseases.
“The ERC Proof of Concept grant is now helping us take ChatRD into the real world, by working directly with clinicians to help shorten the diagnostic odyssey that can burden rare disease patients for years.”
The second project, called ‘GelEV’ will focus on developing technology that can improve the delivery of regenerative medicine to damaged areas of tissue. Led by Meadhbh Brennan, the project is engineering a hyaluronic acid hydrogel for better delivery in extracellular vesicles.
The University of Limerick has also been awarded a grant for a project called ‘Eve Heals’ which hopes to treat skin diseases using organisms created in vitro. The project is led by Dimitrios Zevgolis, who also works across the institutions at UCD.
“Many of today’s innovations start with a researcher asking an important question. These 182 projects show that curiosity-driven science and real-world impact go hand in hand,” said Ekaterina Zaharieva, European commissioner for startups, research and innovation.
“With Proof of Concept Funding, ERC researchers can explore how their findings can become new treatments, technologies, services or solutions that benefit people across Europe.”
The first Proof of Concept round of 2026 invited 15pc more proposals this year compared to last year, the ERC said. Applications for the second round are open, with a September deadline.
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