Liesbet Geris, head of the Biomechanics Research Unit of the GIGA In Silico Medecine, professor at the Faculty of Applied Sciences ( Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering) and Executive Director of our Institute, has just been selected to receive an ERC Consolidator Grant for her INSITE project.
With a grant of € 2,161,750, this scholarship was awarded to continue Lies' research on the development of new in silico strategies (using numerical models) in the field of tissue engineering.
Tissue Engineering (TE) refers to the branch of medicine that aims to replace or regenerate functional tissues or organs by means of living implants, that once placed in the body, will help to repair the sick or injured organs. As the field evolves to more complex TE constructs with sophisticated functionality, there is still a lack of dedicated in vitro devices that can test the response of TE constructs as a whole, prior to implantation. In addition, knowledge accumulated from mechanistic and empirical studies in vitro and in vivo are often underutilized in the development of new TE constructs due to the lack of integration of all these data into a single platform.
The INSITE project, defended by Liesbet Geris, which has just been awarded an ERC Consolidator grant, aims to meet these two challenges by developing, on the one hand, a new mesofluidic device for in vitro testing of TE constructs and, on the other hand, by developing dedicated multi-scale and multi-physics models that aggregate available data and use them to design complex constructs and mesofluidic parameters suitable for simulating the in vivo environment in the in vitro device.
The research project developed by Liesbet Geris could establish new therapeutic approaches in tissue engineering, notably for important and infected bone defects. For this project, she will be able to rely on her previous research work under the BRIDGE project (supported by another grant from the European Research Council) but also an extensive network in the fields of in silico medicine and tissue engineering. If the young woman achieves a convincing result, INSITE will facilitate and accelerate the development of new innovative clinical therapies.
Our best congratulations to Lies for this great achievement!
Further information can be found here
