ERC awards 59 leading researchers with a Proof of Concept grant

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded 59 top researchers with a Proof of Concept Grant of € 150,000 each. Among the mould-breaking ideas are innovations as a simple blood test to diagnose breast cancer, a timber wood tracking device to help prevent illegal deforestation, and artificial veins modelled on marine sponges. The grants allow the researchers to build start-ups, establish intellectual property rights for their inventions or explore other ways to test their ideas on the market.

In this second round of funding, grants go to researchers in 15 countries across the European Research Area: the Netherlands (11), the United Kingdom (9), Spain (8), France (6), Israel (6), Germany (4), Italy (4), Switzerland (3), Ireland (2), Belgium (1), Finland (1), Greece (1), Norway (1), Sweden (1) and Turkey (1).

A total of 442 applications were submitted in this call, which is a 51% increase in comparison to the previous competition. The budget of the entire call is € 18 million. The Proof of Concept call 2015 is currently open. Upcoming deadlines are May 28 and October 1, 2015.

The European Research Council supports frontier research, cross disciplinary proposals and pioneering ideas in new and emerging fields which introduce unconventional and innovative approaches. The ERC's mission is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-driven frontier research across all fields of research, on the basis of scientific excellence.