PRESS RELEASE

Luis Serrano awarded an ERC Advanced Grant in the first edition of this call

• The ERC Advanced Grants are awarded by the European Research Council (ERC) to a few senior researchers in Europe.
• Luis Serrano proposal and career allow him to be the only spanish researcher awarded in the Life Sciences domain, panel of Genetics, Genomics, Bioinformatics and Systems Biology.

This is the first edition of this call, which tries to support the senior research excellence in Europe. The 78 ERC Advanced Grants winners of the Life Sciences domain have been made public today, selected from 766 applications. The grant is valued between 2.5 and 3.5 millions of euros. Spain has been awarded with five ERC Advanced Grants, two of them obtained in Catalonia.

The CRG already won three ERC Starting Grants some months ago by three young researchers of the centre: Ben Lehner, Mark Isalan and Hernán López-Schier. Adding this Advanced Grant, the CRG becomes one of the biomedical research centres with more awards from the ERC.

Luis Serrano

Dr. Serrano, ICREA research professor, is the current EMBL-CRG Systems Biology Unit leader at the CRG and the vice-director of the centre. 

Before leading this Programme, Dr. Serrano was responsible of the Structural and Computational Biology Units at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) and at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL).

With more than 25 years devoted to research, he’s been involved in several reference research groups in Europe. His career includes many collaborations, European projects, and a lot of high-level publications.
In 2007 he got into the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences.

The project: CELLDOCTOR

“Quantitative understanding of a living system and its engineering as a cellular organelle” is the title of the awarded project.

Specifically, the proposal includes the redesign of a simple bacterium to create what we could call an “alive pill”. A vehicle able to get into the human organism, detect the anomalies and repair them. It could be use as well as a vehicle to cure genetic diseases without changing the genetic material of the patient. Like a doctor at the cellular level. The project consider also the fact of understanding, for the first time at the molecular level, how an alive organism works. Including the capacity of redesigning it, in a rational way, creating a minimum organism useful for different applications in fields such as human health or stockbreeding.