image: The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the results of its 2025 Consolidator Grant call, selecting two projects led by Julián Bergueiro and Sara Abalde-Cela for funding. With these new awards, CiQUS now reaches 17 ERC-funded projects, strengthening its position among Europe’s leading centres in chemistry and materials science.
Credit: Julián Bergueiro | Credit: CiQUS Sara Abalde | Credit: Catarina Moura, Madalena Silva (INL)
CiQUS —the Center for Research in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Materials of the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC)— has obtained two new ERC projects, as published today by the European agency. Awarded in the Consolidator Grant category, these competitive grants represent a significant boost to the scientific careers of both researchers, Julián Bergueiro and Sara Abalde-Cela.
With these additions, CiQUS now counts 17 ERC-funded projects across all major schemes (Starting, Consolidator, Advanced, Synergy and Proof of Concept), involving 12 researchers who have received ERC support. Beyond strengthening the centre’s position in the Spanish and European research landscape, this achievement enhances its ability to attract talent and create high-quality research employment. CiQUS is part of the Galician Network of Research Centres (Red CIGUS) and receives support from the European Union through the Galicia ERDF Programme 2021–2027, essential to sustaining high-impact scientific results.
ERC Consolidator Grants target mid-career researchers with outstanding track records and highly innovative projects. This call is one of the most competitive in Europe: the ERC received 3,121 applications and funded 349 projects (an 11% success rate). As the agency noted, this was one of the most competitive calls ever recorded, with unprecedented demand and “many excellent projects that could not be funded”.
ChiroPore, led by CiQUS researcher Julián Bergueiro, introduces an innovative strategy to achieve selective molecular transport across membranes—a central challenge in biotechnology and supramolecular chemistry. Inspired by natural recognition systems, the project proposes a “lock-and-key” mechanism based on helical structures capable of distinguishing molecules with high precision. This approach will enable the design of advanced synthetic pores, opening new possibilities for controlled drug delivery, biosensing and cellular communication.
“We aim to develop the first artificial system capable of selectively regulating the passage of macromolecules across cellular membranes,” says Bergueiro. Such control, he explains, could “enable precise delivery of large biomolecules into cells—with implications for applications such as gene therapy—and pave the way for new modes of cellular communication.” For the researcher, receiving an ERC Consolidator Grant also brings the opportunity to pursue a level of scientific ambition not attainable through other funding mechanisms and to consolidate his laboratory internationally.
OBSERVER, the project led by Sara Abalde-Cela, seeks to study cell–cell communication as a dynamic, multilevel process, overcoming the limitations of current methods. The project will develop an optofluidic platform capable of co-encapsulating cancer and immune cells at the single-cell level, monitoring their interactions in real time and analysing downstream gene expression. This technology will deepen understanding of metastasis-related processes and open new avenues in microfluidics, nanobiosensing and advanced data analytics.
“Just like people, cells hold conversations at different levels —private, local or long-distance— and these dialogues shape essential decisions about their fate, including the ability to colonise new organs and form metastases,” Abalde-Cela explains. “Yet current approaches only capture fragments of these exchanges. With OBSERVER, we aim to develop technologies capable of recording multiple types of cell–cell interactions simultaneously and linking them to cellular outcomes, by combining microfluidics, nano-optical sensing and multimodal single-cell analysis. Moving in this direction will help us understand how communication becomes dysregulated in diseases such as cancer, identify new vulnerabilities and biomarkers, and open the door to more effective therapeutic strategies.” For Abalde-Cela, receiving an ERC Consolidator Grant marks a turning point: an opportunity to advance a research vision built over the past decade, with genuine scientific freedom and strong potential impact in cancer biomedicine —something she finds particularly motivating on a personal level.
Both researchers have strong international trajectories. Julián Bergueiro, PhD from USC, carried out postdoctoral research at the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Tokyo before joining CiQUS with a Juan de la Cierva fellowship, later continuing with a Ramón y Cajal contract. His work focuses on helical polymers and peptides with controlled topology for biomedical applications. Sara Abalde-Cela, PhD from the University of Vigo, has developed her career at institutions such as the University of Cambridge (UK) and the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL) in Portugal. She is currently a Principal Investigator in the INL’s Medical Devices group and combines her research with her role as co-founder and CTO of RUBYnanomed, a leading company in liquid biopsy technologies.
The awarding of these two new ERC projects further strengthens CiQUS’s position as a hub of scientific excellence in Galicia and Europe, contributing to the advancement of fundamental knowledge and the development of new technologies with potential impact in biomedicine, chemistry and biotechnology.