Liesbet Geris gets an ERC Consolidator Grant for her INSITE project

Liesbet Geris, head of the biomechanical engineering laboratory at the In silico Medicine Unit (GIGA), and professor at the School of Engineering (Aerospace and Mechanics Department), has just been selected to receive an ERC Consolidator Grant for her INSITE project. With a grant of €2,161,750, she was awarded this scholarship to continue her research into the development of new in silico strategies (using digital models) in the field of tissue engineering.en évidence coloré

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issue engineering (TE) refers to the branch of medicine that aims to replace or regenerate functional tissues or organs with living artificial implants, i.e. implants that, once placed in the body, will help to repair diseased or injured organs. While the field is evolving towards increasingly complex TE constructions with sophisticated functionalities, there is still a lack of dedicated in vitro* devices to test the response of the TE construction as a whole, before its implementation. In addition, the knowledge accumulated from mechanistic and empirical studies in vitro and in vivo is often underutilized in the development of new TE constructions due to the lack of integration of all this 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 a new mesofluidic device for in vitro testing of TE constructions and by developing dedicated multi-scale and multi-physical models that combine the available data and use them to design complex constructions and appropriate mesofluidic parameters to simulate the in vivo environment in the in vitro device.

The research project developed by Liesbet Geris could establish new therapeutic approaches in tissue engineering, particularly for significant and infected bone defects. To carry out this project, it will be able to rely on its previous research work within the framework of the BRIDGE project (supported by another grant from the European Research Council) but also on a vast 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 and innovative clinical therapies.

Find out more about Liesbet GERIS' research: In silico medicine

ERC Consolidator Grants

ERC Grants  are major instruments deployed by the European Research Council to fund research projects in Europe. The procedure, which is extremely selective, selects only the best researchers and very high-level research projects, combining boldness and competence to tackle new research avenues that, if successful, could substantially enrich knowledge.

ERC Consolidator grants are designed to help researchers with between 7 and 12 years of experience since obtaining their PhD, very promising scientific experience and an excellent research proposal.

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Liesbet GERIS