A British research team has been successful in joining a major European project searching for ways to produce blood stem cells for transplants.
The project is one of 57 awarded ‘Synergy Grants’ last week by the European Research Council (ERC) in a share-out of €571 million to 184 research centres in 24 countries.
Dr Cristina Pina, of Brunel University, London, has been granted about £2 million worth of funding for her role in the MakingBlood project, which is to be led by a Spanish research team and has total funding of around ten million Euros for six years.
Dr Pina, senior lecturer in biomedical sciences, said: “By producing blood stem cells in the lab, the MakingBlood project aspires to achieve off-the-shelf, donor-independent treatment options for all patients who require a stem cell transplant.”
The project is to be led by Dr Anna Bigas, of the Hospital del Mar Research Institute, Barcelona, Spain. Three other centres across Europe, in Finland and the Netherlands, are also involved. Dr Bigas said: “This is an ambitious and risky project."
The team will “try to understand the whole stem cell maturation process first, and then simulate them to recreate fully functional cells in the lab”.
Professor Cecilia Sahlgren, professor of cell biology at Åbo Akademi University, Finland, said: “We will use the newest analysis techniques and a multidisciplinary approach to decipher the factors that are essential for the formation, proliferation, maintenance and correct function of blood stem cells in the human body. Our approach can, in the future, be used as a bioreactor to produce blood stem cells and differentiated blood cell types, such as red and white blood cells, as off-the-shelf products to gradually replace the need for voluntary tissue donations.”
Barcelona is also to play host to another haematology-related Synergy Grant funded by the ERC. A project called BEMOSAIC, at the Josep Carreras Institute, is to study the endothelium of blood vessels, examining the hypothesis that it is a mosaic of different cell types developing specialised functions. The project, led by Dr Mariona Graupera will also involve Yale University, USA, and the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.
A third project, called MUTAHOME, is benefitting from the expertise of leukaemia researcher Prof Dominique Bonnet, at the Francis Crick Institute in London. The project, led by scientists at the Crick and Queen Mary University of London, is studying how natural genetic mutations affect tissue homeostasis in different organs.
Professor Maria Leptin, the ERC President, said: “It is so inspiring to see how the Synergy Grants bring together remarkable researchers from many disciplines, countries and even continents, united by their ambition to tackle difficult research questions.”
Sources: ERC / Research Centres
Links: https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/news/erc-2024-synergy-grants-results
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