A team of researchers from TU Delft, Imperial College London, and Aalto University have received a EIC Pathfinder Challenge grant of 4 million euros for their NextSkins research project on Engineered Living Materials. With this funding, they will develop two types of multi-layered therapeutic and regenerative living materials in the next five years, each with different application areas, i.e., in healthcare for the treatment of human skin diseases; and in high-performance applications,  such as protective garments in sports.

Project coordinator Marie-Eve Aubin-Tam and fellow TU Delft researcher Elvin Karana initiated the NextSkins project together with their collaborators Tom Ellis (Imperial College London) and Markus Linder (Aalto University). They both study living materials, Aubin-Tam as Associate Professor in Bionanoscience, and Karana as Professor of Materials Innovation and Design. “We met at Biodate, a speed-dating event for Delft principal investigators to find interdisciplinary collaborators,” Aubin-Tam says. Karana notes that working in this consortium is a dream project for her: “The future of living materials innovation is interdisciplinary. It’s such a pleasure to work with great people who have the same level of ambition to make material-driven societal impact.”

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