€10m research grant to underpin sculptable tissues shared by Imperial researchers

Professor Tom Ellis has been awarded a €3.3 million share of a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Synergy Grant.

The funding will be used to investigate how living cells can sculpt their own environments - paving the way for a new generation of biomaterials.

The six-year project, titled RODIN – Cell-mediated Sculptable Living Platforms, brings together a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the UK and Portugal. It aims to transform the field of tissue engineering by shifting the focus from designing materials for cells to enabling cells to design and reshape their own surroundings.

Professor Ellis, a synthetic biologist in Imperial’s Department of Bioengineering, joins forces with biomaterials engineer Professor João Mano (University of Aveiro) and physicist Professor Nuno Araújo (University of Lisbon), whose expertise includes soft matter and origami-inspired folding.

“What’s exciting about this project is that we’re giving cells sculptable materials - thin, flexible films they can physically reshape as they grow,” said Professor Ellis. “This lets us study what shapes cells naturally want to form, and how that affects their behaviour. It’s a fundamental shift in how we think about biomaterials.”

Cells as architects

In the human body, cells grow within the extracellular matrix—a dynamic scaffold they produce and remodel themselves. Traditional biomaterials used in tissue engineering, such as hydrogels, act as passive scaffolds. The RODIN project scientists will perform experiments to design and test new materials that cells can actively manipulate, mimicking the co-evolution of cells and their environments seen in nature.

The project will begin by testing two types of sculptable materials - one developed by Ellis’s team at Imperial and another by the Portuguese collaborators - to observe how cells reshape them. These experiments will generate large datasets linking cell activity to the physical structures they create, with a particular focus on bone tissue formation.

“We’ve chosen bone growth as our test case because it’s well understood and has a huge clinical need,” Ellis explained. “With an ageing population, the demand for bone replacement therapies is growing rapidly. If we can learn how cells prefer to grow bone, we can design better materials to support that.”

With an aging population, an increase in orthopedic surgeries, and a rise in degenerative diseases like osteoarthritis, the scientists are setting their sights on materials that could ultimately be used for bone grafts and substitutes, which have significant market potential in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. 

A fusion of disciplines

RODIN integrates three scientific frontiers:

• Biomaterials engineering to create ultra-thin, flexible films
• Synthetic biology to encode biological control into the materials
• Computational physics to model how geometry and mechanics influence cell behaviour

Professor Araújo’s work on soft matter and self-folding structures will help decode how cells interact with and reshape their environments, using principles from origami and physics.

The €10 million ERC Synergy Grant will be split equally between the three teams, with Imperial receiving €3.3 million. The funding will support fundamental research, experimental development, and data analysis over the next six years.

Towards smarter biomaterials

By learning from the ‘architectural wisdom’ of cells, the team hopes to design biomaterials that not only host life - but learn from it. The insights gained could accelerate drug discovery, improve regenerative medicine, and reduce reliance on animal testing.

“Cells are nature’s engineers,” said Professor Ellis. “By giving them the right tools, we can uncover their blueprints for building life-like structures.”

Horizon Europe at Imperial

The UK is fully associated to Horizon Europe and Imperial researchers can participate in and lead projects across the programme. Participation in the EU research framework programmes is a springboard to productive partnerships across the world – strengthening the influence and impact of UK research.

To find out more about opportunities in Horizon Europe, please get in touch with the Research Office and the Enterprise Research Impact Management Office.