Carlijn Bouten (TU/e) received an ERC Advanced Grant of 2.5 million euro grant along with an additional half a million euros for equipment for her project RE-ALIGN: restoring anisotropy in living tissues ‘in situ’.
Living heart muscle
The research focuses on repair in the living heart. The goal is to eventually be able to repair cardiac tissue exclusively using the self-organizing capacity of the tissue. “Once I have fully explored this capacity, I then aim to use ultrasound to encourage tissue to organize itself. Previous research has shown this to be possible, but those studies did not take place in living tissue. Now the task is to understand exactly what happens in living cardiac tissue, so that we can eventually use this technique for a new non-invasive repair method in regenerative medicine. Just applied by a cardiologist in the hospital, and without surgery.”
An ERC Advanced Grant is awarded to high-risk, high-reward research. “The risk is that in this research we may not yet succeed in being able to control the self-organizing capacity, but then I would at least like to achieve a much better understanding of how order and chaos affect the mechanical and biological function of tissues in the body,” Bouten adds. Carlijn Bouten received the 2.5 million euro grant along with an additional half a million euros for equipment.
Source: TU/e
