Chemical Engineering researcher awarded €2.5m ERC grant for artificial blood project

Professor Sakis Mantalaris has been awarded a €2.5m five year Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (ERC).  Established under the EU’s Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7), the grants target distinguished researchers based in Europe.  Of the five Advanced Grants awarded to Chemical Engineers since the scheme began in 2007, four have been based at Imperial College. Collaborators on the BioBlood project include Dr Nicki Panoskaltsis (Haematology) and Prof Stratos Pistikopoulos (Chemical Engineering) along with the National Blood Service.

Prof. Mantalaris’s BioBlood project broadly aims to deliver personalised healthcare - customised treatment that is tailored to the individual patient by the use of patient-specific data and cell-based therapies.  Using a unique approach that combines both experimentation and computer modelling, BioBlood represents a platform for the identification of optimal chemotherapy treatments that are adapted to best fit an individual patient’s need.  It is hoped that the project can help bring about a change in personalised medicine, specifically in the treatment of haematological cancers such as leukaemia and lymphoma.

“Developing the technology platform to address such important clinical needs as blood transfusion and chemotherapy treatment for leukaemia has been an ambition of mine since I started my academic career in the department,” said Prof. Mantalaris. “The strength of the BioBlood project lies in the inter-disciplinary approach from the get-go. The ultimate challenge for BioBlood is strong fundamentals and clinical translation.”  

It is also hoped that the BioBlood project will find a solution to the problem of blood donor shortage.  In the UK alone, nearly 1 million litres of blood are transfused annually in to patients from donors, at a cost of approximately £300m.  Prof. Mantalaris and colleagues aim to meet the challenges of blood supply, pathogen infection and reduction of patient mortality by developing a new method for the mass production of red blood cells for clinical use.  The work could also have implications for the introduction of new drugs to market, currently an extremely long, complex and expensive process.  BioBlood would enable pharmaceutical companies to bring novel therapies to market more quickly by speeding up clinical trials considerably.

BioBlood is one of just 284 successful peer-reviewed bids from over 2,400 applications, in what is the final year of the €7.5b FP7 Programme.