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ivBM-4PAP 4th Consortium Meeting in Angers

10 March 2025

On 29-31 Jan 2025 the 4th Consortium meeting of the European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA) project ivBM-4PAP was held in person hosted by Prof. David Rousseau, head of the Laboratoire LARIS at Université d'Angers.

The meeting also hosted the upcoming new partner in the Consortium, Universidade de Coimbra (𝐔𝐂), in the persons of Prof.  Maria Rosário Almeida, Senior Investigator in human genetics at the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology CNC, and her colleague Prof. Isabel Santana, PI of the Neuropsychology Laboratory and Dementia Clinic at the Centro Hospitalar e Universitário de Coimbra (CHUC). UC will join very soon the ongoing ivBM-4PAP project thanks to the Hop On Facility Call within the Programme Horizon Europe 2023-2024.

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Brillouin microscopy at the 7th International BioBrillouin conference.

19 September 2024
Last week Dr. Claudia Testi (post doc at IIT and involved in the ivBM-4PAP project) attended the 7th International BioBrillouin conference in Trondheim, Norway (11-13 September 2024). She presented her results, obtained in collaboration with IRCCS San Raffaele Hospital (Milan) on the use of Brillouin Microscopy in the characterization of mechanical features of murine bladder in a pathological condition, i.e. actinic cystitis. This work represents an additional step towards the main objective of the ivBM-4PAP project: Brillouin microscope as the only diagnostic tool with a fast, non-contact, label-free method with micrometric resolution for earlier detection of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental diseases.
For more information on the study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-51006-2.
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Upcoming events: Festival Delle Scienze 2024

17 April 2024
The error of man, the error of the machine. Making mistakes is a necessary step to learning. It applies to human beings as well as to the models training the neural networks on which algorithms and artificial intelligence are based. Recognizing and managing errors is therefore an important step, both in basic research and in its applications, such as medical research. But what if the error is made when choosing the data to train the machines with? And how are these errors identified and corrected? Prof. Giancarlo Ruocco (ivBM-4PAP Coordinator) together with other scientists and experts will answer these and other questions at the Festival Delle Scienze on 21th April at the Auditorium Parco Della Musica Ennio Morricone in Rome.
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First ivBM-4PAP Review Meeting

16 April 2024
The first ivBM-4PAP review meeting was held online and successfully concluded on the 10th of April 2024! The project results have been presented via individual workpackages in a very friendly atmosphere to the project officer and technical reviewers. The project execution paradigm didn't need to be changed as all the planned milestones, results and deliverables for the first reporting period have been successfully reached. The consortium is already working on the next deliverables to be addresed. Congratulations to the whole team!

ivBM-4PAP 2nd Consortium Meeting

13 February 2024

The second ivBM-4PAP Consortium meeting was held in Zaragoza, on 31nd Jan-1st Feb 2024, hosted by Prof. Nunilo Cremades at the Institute of Biocomputing and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI) of the University of Zaragoza.

In the first day, both scientific and management sessions were discussed. Basically, all the partners presented their scientific activities reached in the first Reporting Period (Month 12, i.e. 29th February 2024) based on the Grant Agreement signed with the EU Commission. As expected, all the tasks were carried out as planned in due time. In the following session (management), the guidelines and deadlines for planning the work on the 1st ivBM-4PAP Periodic Report to the EU Commission were shared with the Consortium by the IIT project management staff aimed at creating a smooth coordination among the partners to achieve the final goal in the due date, i.e. 31th March 2024.

The next Consortium Appointment will be the 1st Review Meeting (online) with the ivBM-4PAP Project Officer (PO) and external experts for evaluating the scientific work, the project impact (from the scientific, technological, economic and social points of view) and the management procedures carried out in this first year of action.

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ivBM-4PAP First Consortium Meeting

02 October 2023

On 29 September, the Consortium of the ivBM-4PAP project met online to examine the state-of-play of ongoing project activities, six months after its kick-off.

The meeting was divided into two sessions. In the first one, the PIs shared their advancements based on the project’s achievements to be reached within the end of the first Reporting Period (i.e. February 2024). The following session focused on financial management, dissemination, exploitation and communication strategies/activities planned in the first year of the project. Overall, the project is running smoothly and the partners headed back with the good perspective of being in the right way for achieving the 1st year project tasks in due time.

The next Consortium Meeting is planned to be held in person on January 2024 at Zaragoza (Spain).

ivBM-4PAP Kick-off Meeting

21 April 2023
ivBM-4PAP official kick-off meeting (KoM) was held virtually on Microsoft Teams on April 21, 2023, since scientists from the five Institutions composing the consortium met in person in Rome in a 1-day event hosted by CrestOptics a few days after the starting date of the project (March 1st, 2023). Accordingly, the KoM was structured as a half-day event in which the project was addressed both from the scientific and management points of view. Therefore, the participation of administrative staff from some Institutions was particularly appreciated. At the beginning of the meeting, as coordinator, Prof. Giancarlo Ruocco (Italian Institute of Technology, IIT) gave an overview of the whole project structure, followed by presentations by ivBM-4PAP partners. The content of presentations included a description of tasks, deliverables, and upcoming actions of the respective WPs. The last part of the event was dedicated to project coordination and management and discussing the plan for dissemination, exploitation and communication activities as essential aspects of a successful project. To facilitate discussions, a Q&A session was organised at the end of the meeting, and this led to positive interactions among participants, fostering a successful and proactive collaboration within the consortium.

Micro4PAP: a new microscope generation for in-vivo imaging of cells mechanics

13 September 2023

The project coordinated by Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia has been funded with 3 million euro by the European Union.

Genoa/Rome (Italy), 13th September 2023 – A tool that uses light to study biological molecules without interfering with their nanometric structure and that allows scientists to image basic living mechanisms with sub-millisecond acquisition time. It is the new generation microscope Micro4PAP, which is able to perform in-vivo imaging of the cell mechanical properties (rigidity, stiffness, viscosity), which is under development within the EU-funded project Micro4PAP led by the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT-Italian Institute of Technology). The new device will be able to perform state-of-the art in vivo images of cells and tissues mechanics, facilitating the understanding of physiologic as well as pathologic processes, such as those involved, for example, in the neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental diseases.

 

The project received more than 3 million euros from the European Innovation Council (EIC) under the Horizon Europe programme for research and innovation. The name “Micro4PAP” is a simplification of its technical title “IVBM-4PAP”, which stands for “In-Vivo Brillouin Microscope with application to Protein Aggregation-based Pathologies”.

Micro4PAP is coordinated by Giancarlo Ruocco and Gian Gaetano Tartaglia, Principal Investigators at IIT in Rome and in Genova. It originated from the necessity of having a new tool to investigate the mechanical properties of biological cells and tissues and acquire information to identify better disorders’ diagnosis and treatment.

Many biological processes are based on liquid-liquid and liquid-solid phase transitions, such as aggregates formation and dissolution, chromatin (the protein and nucleic acids in which genome is organized) organization and nucleus-cytoplasmic transport; alteration of these processes is linked with multiple human diseases ranging from neurodegenerative disorders to cancer.

The Micro4PAP project aims at developing a fast-scan Brillouin Microscope, a type of optical elastography which does not touch or interfere with the biological sample – thus being non-destructive, label- and contact-free method – and will be able to probe the mechanical properties, such as the viscoelastic properties of sub-cellular elements, with a 3D resolution exclusively limited to light diffraction. This novel method would be capable of sub-millisecond acquisition time, and is therefore suitable for in-vivo measurements in living cells.

Micro4PAP may be applied on the study of different pathologies, such neurodegenerative disorders, tumors, chronic and age-related diseases, thus representing a promising tool for clinical-oriented research, enhancing the capability for early disease detection, diagnosis and therapy.

Besides IIT, the Micro4PAP consortium includes research institutes, universities and companies in Italy (Università di Trento, Crestoptics S.p.A.), France (Université d’Angers) and Spain (Universidad Zaragoza).

The project website: https://ivbm4pap.eu/