João Mano received an ERC Synergy Grant, one of the most competitive and prestigious funding schemes awarded by the European Research Council (ERC).

ERC Grants are distinguished by their support for projects of scientific excellence and for promoting cutting-edge research. Among these, Synergy Grants represent the most ambitious level: they are awarded to interdisciplinary teams of top researchers, capable of addressing scientific questions of such complexity that they cannot be solved by a single researcher or discipline. Selection is based exclusively on scientific excellence, and success rates are extremely low.

This achievement represents the 12th ERC grant awarded to CICECO, consolidating its position among Portuguese institutions with the greatest capacity to attract excellent European funding.

Project RODIN: from passive structures to materials molded by cells

The RODIN – Cell-mediated Sculptable Living Platforms project proposes a radical shift in tissue engineering: instead of scientists designing materials for cells, the project will give the cells themselves materials that they can actively shape, record what they do, and learn the rules behind that behavior. The central scientific challenge is to understand how cells physically and biologically remodel their surroundings and transform that knowledge into principles for creating more efficient biomaterials that are closer to living systems.

If successful, RODIN will open a new way of engineering living systems. Materials and cells will no longer have a one-way relationship, where the material only accommodates the cells. Instead, both will adapt to each other. This could lead to: smarter scaffolds for tissue regeneration, more realistic disease models, faster drug testing platforms, and a reduction in animal experimentation.

The consortium brings together three top researchers with highly complementary skills: João Mano (professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Aveiro and member of the associated laboratory CICECO – Aveiro Institute of Materials), a biomaterials engineer; Tom Ellis (professor at Imperial College London, UK), a synthetic biologist; and Nuno Araújo (professor at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon), a physicist specializing in complex systems. Together they will rethink how materials and living systems co-evolve.

From passive supports to cell-shaped materials

For decades, biomaterials for medical applications have been primarily designed by humans, often through a slow, formulation-by-formulation process that does not fully capture what cells actually need. This approach has clear limitations. Cells in embryos or regenerating tissues do not wait for a perfect support. They pull, push, bend, excrete, and reorganize their microenvironment until it matches their developmental program.

RODIN will recreate something similar in the laboratory. The team will develop very thin, flexible, and moldable biomaterial films that living cells can deform as they grow. As the cells organize themselves, they leave an imprint on the material. By analyzing the structures that cells create when asked to form a specific tissue, the project aims to discover the geometric and mechanical signals that the cells themselves consider ideal. This is the central challenge: to decode the architectural rules that cells instinctively apply and reuse them to design better materials.

A fusion of disciplines and technologies

To address this challenge, RODIN combines: biomaterials engineering to create ultra-thin, reconfigurable films sensitive to cellular forces; synthetic biology to incorporate controllable biological functions into these films and guide cellular behavior from within; computational physics and machine learning to model the interaction between mechanics, geometry, and biochemistry and extract rules from large datasets on cell-material interactions.

It is this integration that makes the project possible. Only by observing cell-driven remodeling in well-defined materials and analyzing it quantitatively can the team move from trial-and-error biomaterials to rule-based biomaterials.

“Cells are nature's engineers. If we give them the right tools and carefully observe what they build, we can learn their own blueprints,” say the project leaders.

RODIN is funded under the European Research Council's Synergy scheme, which supports groups of excellent researchers who come together to tackle problems so ambitious that they cannot be solved by a single principal investigator. As with all ERC grants, scientific excellence is the sole selection criterion, with Synergy projects adding the requirement of genuine and interdependent collaboration between the partners.

João Mano will be the corresponding principal investigator (Corresponding PI) of the project, a term that can be translated as spokesperson principal investigator. Nuno Araújo (University of Lisbon) and Tom Ellis (Imperial College London) will be the other two principal investigators of the RODIN project.

History of grants awarded by the European Research Council

João Mano, coordinator of the COMPASS research group at the CICECO – Aveiro Institute of Materials Associated Laboratory, embraces this new challenge, which he considers “highly motivating and will be fundamental for the group and the research unit to continue to progress scientifically,” after having coordinated projects funded with two advanced grants and three proof-of-concept grants funded by the European Research Council.