The European Innovation Council provides €3 million in funding for a project with IGTP involvement
The European Commission has granted €2,999,101 in funding to the NanoBiCar project, coordinated by Universitat Politècnica de València, with the participation of the Germans Trias i Pujol Research Institute (IGTP). The grant falls within the EIC Pathfinder Program of the European Innovation Council (EIC), a highly competitive program aimed at identifying, developing, and scaling up breakthrough technologies and disruptive innovations.
This year's EIC Pathfinder Open call selected 45 new projects from over 1100 applicants to develop cutting-edge technologies in various fields: health, artificial intelligence, computing, environment, and energy. The selected proposals come from 25 countries, with five projects from Spain.
One of these projects is NanoBiCar, coordinated by Universitat Politècnica de València and carried out in collaboration with research centres from Spain, Israel, France, and the Netherlands. Among them is IGTP, represented by Pere-Joan Cardona, leader of the Clinical and Experimental Microbiology Unit (UMCiE).
The NanoBiCar project aims to revolutionise the treatment of bacterial infections with an innovative immunotherapeutic approach, addressing many of the challenges posed by current treatments, with potential applications in other fields. Using tuberculosis as a proof of concept, the researchers will employ specific markers to identify cells infected by Mycobacterium tuberculosis and extracellular bacteria on three immunotherapeutic platforms that have not yet been tested in bacterial diseases.
The techniques used will be safe, cost-effective, easy to use, and highly specific, without generating resistance, and highly adaptable for resource-limited settings. Moreover, they will be effective regardless of antibiotic resistance, the host's genetic variant, or the patient's immune status.
Mireia Giménez Barcons, head of international projects at IGTP's Project Unit, explains that "the project's results could have a significant impact both scientifically and socially, as they are based on the development of new immunotherapies for the treatment of widely affecting diseases like tuberculosis." She also notes that "through a completely novel immunotherapeutic strategy, the project could develop a universal method to combat various forms of tuberculosis infection, and potentially apply it to other highly prevalent infections and diseases such as cancer. These pioneering techniques could mark a turning point in the fight against infectious and other diseases, positioning IGTP's research at the forefront of this type of therapy."
Pere-Joan Cardona adds: "This is a disruptive project that could represent a before and after in tuberculosis control, the infectious disease responsible for the most deaths worldwide, causing 1.5 million deaths each year. Due to the covid-19 pandemic, we have fallen back more than 15 years in our aspirations to control this disease. One of the biggest challenges is the high number of cases with multi-drug resistant strains, 0.5 million annually, which are very difficult to treat, or rapidly fatal forms of the disease, such as tuberculous meningitis. The immunotherapy proposal we are developing could represent a decisive step in controlling the most aggressive pathogen that currently exists, Mycobacterium tuberculosis."