Ten UCIBIO Projects Funded by FCT’s 2023 Calls: IC&DT and PEX
Ten research projects led by UCIBIO researchers have been awarded funding through the 2023 National calls for Projects in all Scientific Domains, promoted by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT).
In total, 4439 applications were submitted, 2550 to the Scientific Research and Technological Development call (IC&DT/2023), and 1889 to the Exploratory Projects call (PEX/2023), with the latter showing a provisional success rate of 22%. Across both calls, over 90% of funded projects were led by Portuguese researchers, the majority of whom were women (54–56%).
The awarded UCIBIO projects reflect the unit’s core competencies in Engineering and Technology Sciences, Medical and Health Sciences, and Natural Sciences. Eight projects were selected under IC&DT/2023 and two under PEX/2023.
Together, these projects will bring nearly €1.5 million in research funding to UCIBIO, reinforcing its role in driving cutting-edge science and innovation and commitment to scientific excellence.
The UCIBIO researchers awarded with approved IC&DTs/2023 projects are:
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Alexandra Fernandes and Pedro V. Baptista, LIFEBLOOD - Liquid biopsies for patient avatars
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Carla Gonçalves, Establishing Yeast as a Model for Studying Horizontal Gene Transfer Dynamics in Eukaryotes
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Filipa Marcelo, MUC4Health - Mucin glycodomains as innovative and alternative immunomodulatory strategies
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Joana Fradinho, CO2toPHA - Explore CO2 fixation as a new route for PHA production with anoxygenic photosynthetic bacteria
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Maria João Romão, Deciphering Arsenic and Antimony Detoxification Enzymes for Biosensor Application
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Marta Dias, Turning agricultural waste into nutritious and functional aquafeeds: an eco-innovative approach to upgrade farmed marine fish welfare and quality
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Pedro M. Costa, POLLUX - Porphyrinoid metabolism in marine Polychaeta: From ecological trait to biotechnological asset
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Vasco Barreto, Universal CAR-T cells for dogs
The UCIBIO researchers awarded with approved PEX/2023 projects are:
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Susana Palma, SUBTLE - Sustainable anticounterfeiting tags secured with AI authentication
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Paula Gonçalves, Horizontal Acquisition of Regulatory Pathways by a Fructophilic Yeast Lineage
Get to know more about these UCIBIO awarded Projects:
The project “LIFEBLOOD - Liquid biopsies for patient avatars” will be managed by the lab leaders Alexandra Fernandes from the Human Genetics and Cancer Therapeutics lab and Pedro V. Baptista from the Nanomedicine lab, respectively.
LIFEBLOOD transforms CRC therapy using less invasive circulating tumour cells (CTCs) for patient-derived organoids (PDOs) generation, overcoming biopsy limitations & enabling real-time monitoring. Validation with tissue-PDOs, LIFEBLOOD anticipates transformative impacts on treatment prediction. Guided by an experienced team, this high-risk initiative promises to reshape global cancer research and therapy, offering a template for diverse cancers and personalized profiling through liquid biopsy avatars.
The project “Establishing Yeast as a Model for Studying Horizontal Gene Transfer Dynamics in Eukaryotes”, will be carried out by Carla Gonçalves from the Yeast Genomics lab.
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is a fascinating biological process where genes can move between distinct and sometimes distantly related species. It is a common phenomenon in bacteria but extremely rare in eukaryotic organisms like plants, animals, or fungi. Although rare, HGT can play a powerful role in driving evolution and genetic innovation by introducing completely new functions in the host species. This project will use a unique yeast clade (kingdom fungi) in which our lab previously uncovered an exceptionally high number of bacterial genes acquired through HGT, as a model to explore how, why and when foreign genes are integrated, retained, or lost in eukaryotic systems. The project combines comparative genomics with pioneering experimental approaches involving bacteria-to-yeast gene transfer simulations and experimental evolution, aiming to uncover the hidden dynamics of gene transfer in real-time and close-to natural conditions. These insights could not only transform our understanding of evolution but also help explain similar gene transfer processes recently observed in human diseases like cancer. Additionally, it could help advance new gene therapies involving delivery of DNA into human cells.
The project “MUC4Health - Mucin glycodomains as innovative and alternative immunomodulatory strategies”, will be overseen by Filipa Marcelo at the (Bio)molecular Structure and Interactions by NMR lab.
MUC4Health aims to create novel immunomodulation strategies by hemoenzymatically synthetizing mucin glycodomains and providing unprecedented structure-immune relationship data. Through its complementarity and expertise in Glycoscience, MUC4Health’s team purposes to develop antagonists to block tumour glycans/immune lectin interactions, reducing immune suppression in cancer, and agonists to neutralize unwanted immune reactions in autoimmunity.
The project “Explore CO2 fixation as a new route for PHA production with anoxygenic photosynthetic bacteria”, will be developed by Joana Fradinho at the Biochemical Engineering lab.
This project will develop a new phototrophic microbial process that explores the unique capabilities of anoxygenic phototrophic bacteria (APB) to fixate CO2 into PHA, a biodegradable biopolymer that can be an alternative to synthetic plastics. Single strains and APB mixed cultures, from lab up to pilot-scale operation will be studied to deliver a cost-effective PHA producing technology that can simultaneously mitigate CO2 and plastic pollution.
The project “Deciphering Arsenic and Antimony Detoxification Enzymes for Biosensor Application” will be developed under the supervision of Maria João Romão, coordinator of the Structural and Molecular Biology research group and Lab leader of the XTAL - Macromolecular Crystallography lab.
This project addresses the environmental problem of arsenic (As) and antimony (Sb) contamination in drinking water and seafood. It involves investigating enzymes capable of metabolizing As and Sb. With a strong background and preliminary data, we are well positioned to develop enhanced, highly efficient, and specific enzymes tailored for novel biosensors designed for detection of As and Sb. The outcomes of this project will constitute a considerable step forward in solving one of the largest environmental contamination problems worldwide. They will contribute to solving remaining drawbacks in As/Sb biosensing such as those faced by water sensing startups, namely time of response, stability, scalability and production cost, issues that have been delaying market deployment.
The project “GreenFeed4Fish - Turning agricultural waste into nutritious and functional aquafeeds: an eco-innovative approach to upgrade farmed marine fish welfare and quality”, was proposed by Marta Dias at the time of the application, a UCIBIO researcher, who is currently at CIIMAR. The project will be implemented at UCIBIO by Carolina Madeira from the SeaTox lab.
GreenFeed4Fish will reuse agricultural wastes rich in micronutrients and bioactive compounds to be incorporated into aquafeeds to improve immuno-metabolic responses and nutritional value of farmed gilthead seabream under Zero Waste and Circular Economy frameworks. This project will use a multidisciplinary approach to validate these specific endpoints and a life cycle assessment tool will be applied to confirm process and product sustainability. Get to know more about on the projects’ website: Here
The project, “POLLUX - Porphyrinoid metabolism in marine Polychaeta: From ecological trait to biotechnological asset”, is a collaborative project between the NOVA FCT’s UCIBIO and LAQV poles and GIMM, which will be led by UCIBIO’s researcher Pedro M. Costa, lab leader of the SeaTox Lab.
Biological pigments are highly prized molecules for biotechnologists. The role of animal pigmentation extends far beyond signalling, camouflage and key physiological aspects such as gas transport. It allows unsuspicious marine animals to survive exposure to sunlight while dwelling in intertidal puddles, enables photo-sensing and offers protection from predators, competitors or parasites. Comparing pigmentation patterns and underlying metabolic pathways may shed light on evolution, ecology and even vulnerability to changing oceans, thus acting as an ecological indicator of environmental integrity just like bleaching reveals coral health. Research on pigment metabolism can, therefore, have a key role in bioconservation. Most importantly, however, investigating the bioactivity and biosynthetic pathways of pigments enables the envisaging of biotechnological and biomedical applications for these metabolites. Accordingly, the central enterprise of POLLUX is to comparatively investigate in common but distinct species of Polychaeta of the Western European intertidal the biotechnological potential of porphyrinoid and other or derived tetrapyrrolic pigments. Our main paradigm is that by understanding how their metabolic and biosynthetic pathways adapted to the environment we can reconstruct the span of novel pigments and their most significant properties, e.g., as biocides and photosensitisers in photodynamic therapy against a variety of skin diseases, cancer included, for which there is an important and valuable demand for research and biopharma industry.
The project “Universal CAR-T cells for dogs” is a collaborative work involving four of the major universities in Portugal that Vasco M. Barreto, the lab leader of the Gene Editing lab, will coordinate.
This proposal aims to develop the first universal, latest-generation CAR-T cell for dogs. Thus far, no one has developed such a tool for non-primate animals, i.e., a cell line engineered to kill malignant cells from leukaemias and lymphomas that expresses the most efficient CAR transgene to date and has been further engineered at the level of the genome to perform regardless of the genetic background of the patient dog. Such an “off-the-shelf” tool would minimize the logistical requirements and overall cost of the therapy, thus eliminating the ethical and equity concerns. The end goal is threefold: 1) a “living drug” with enormous commercial potential that will improve the well-being of dogs and their owners at affordable prices, which could be tested in clinical trials to treat lymphoma and leukaemia in the medium term; 2) a platform (the genetically engineered ciPSC line) to produce CAR-T that treat other cancers in dogs, including solid tumours; 3) a proof of concept that dogs can be used as model organisms for trials more relevant to humans than experiments performed in mice.
The project “SUBTLE - Sustainable anticounterfeiting tags secured with AI authentication”, will be undertaken by Susana Palma at the Biomolecular Engineering lab.
Counterfeit products represent 5% of all imports in the EU, amounting to as much as 119 billion € annually, and growing in the EU alone. This is a critical socio-economic problem that causes enormous losses to industry and seriously threatens human health. The WHO reports that 10% of medicines circulating worldwide are counterfeits and fake medicines kill more than 250,000 children/year. Despite being widely implemented, most current anti-counterfeiting tags (like holograms, watermarks or radiofrequency identification tags) are based on deterministic encoding mechanisms that can be duplicated or faked. Physically unclonable function (PUF) tags address this security vulnerability as they cannot be duplicated because of their natural physical variability, which makes each tag unique and impossible to repeat or falsify. SUBTLE combines biobased optical tags and digital transformation, towards a new generation of low-cost & sustainable multifunctional PUF authentication system including invisible physical tags and an AI authentication algorithm stored in the Cloud. SUBTLE will contribute to prevent health risks, financial losses, and erosion of brand reputation by ensuring product authenticity and safety across the supply chain until it reaches the consumer, in line with goals 3, 9, and 12 of the 2030 Agenda.
The project “Horizontal Acquisition of Regulatory Pathways by a Fructophilic Yeast Lineage” will be developed by Paula Gonçalves, the lab leader of the Yeast Genomics lab.
This project investigates how genes can jump between unrelated organisms - horizontal gene transfer (HGT) - and still work in their new host. We study a flower-associated group of yeasts (the W/S clade) that has taken up many genes from bacteria and filamentous fungi. Past work showed these genes rewired metabolism, for example by restoring alcoholic fermentation and enabling vitamin B1 synthesis. We now focus on rarer cases in which regulatory systems, not metabolic genes, were transferred. Using mutants and RNA-sequencing, we will test whether a bacterial LysR-type transcription factor and a fungal pathway producing glycine-betaine act as regulators. We will also try to identify additional HGT involving regulatory systems in 25 more genomes.
Congratulations to all awarded researchers!!