KI researchers awarded first EIC grants

Assistant Professor Onur Parlak, at the Department of Medicine, Solna, will receive close to EUR1 million as part of a EUR3.7 million project on epilepsy coordinated from Portugal. The project is one of 56 selected to receive the first financing from the Pathfinder program, which is EIC’s fund for early-stage development of future technologies.

“In this multidisciplinary project, we will develop a wearable epidermal bioelectronic device to continuously measure some key biomarkers directly from the skin to predict epileptic seizures before they happen,” says Onur Parlak, who works closely with clinicians on developing medical sensors from his own KI lab. “At KI, we will also seek to develop preventive methods.”

EIC Transition

Professor Ganesh Acharya, at the Department of Clinical Science, Intervention and Technology, will receive EUR150,000 as part of a EUR2.5 million grant awarded from EIC Transition and coordinated from Norway by Professor Balpreet Singh Ahluwalia, who is also an affiliated researcher at KI. This program supports innovations that are ready to be validated in the lab and application-relevant environments and move toward future commercialisation. It can essentially serve as follow-on funding to projects supported by EIC Pathfinder, European Research Council Proof of Concept, or the former EU grant program Future and Emerging Technologies (FET).

“The aim of this project is to provide a new high-throughput imaging platform equipped with an affordable optical nanoscope that can deliver super-resolution imaging with a large field of view,” says Ganesh Acharya, who is also head of the Division of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at CLINTEC. “At KI, we will use placental tissue samples obtained after childbirth to validate this new imaging technology and investigate whether it could facilitate and improve the histopathological diagnosis of placental disorders, such as preeclampsia.”