Professor Cosima Baldari, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Life Sciences, has been awarded a prestigious ERC Proof of Concept (PoC) Grant for the project “SMART-SMAPs”, selected during the first round of the 2026 call. This specific funding scheme, which provides a grant of €150,000 per project, is designed to bridge the gap between frontier research and innovation. It allows researchers who have already secured an ERC grant to explore the commercial or societal potential of their findings, funding activities such as verifying market viability, clarifying intellectual property rights, or conducting initial clinical testing.

The project stems from a pioneering discovery made during her previous ERC Synergy project: SMAPs (Supramolecular Attack Particles), autonomous nanoparticles released by the cytotoxic cells of our immune system to eliminate tumor or infected cells. These nanoparticles possess extraordinary properties that make them ideal candidates for a new type of universal immunotherapy, as they maintain their killer efficiency even after being purified, remain active for an extended period, and do not trigger rejection reactions.

Until now, however, the therapeutic use of these nanoparticles faced a structural limitation due to a lack of selectivity, causing them to indiscriminately target both diseased and healthy cells.

Thanks to the collaborative work of the research group led by Professor Baldari—with key contributions from Professor Nagaja Capitani, researchers Anna Onnis and Chiara Cassioli, and PhD student Maria Carmela Cavallo—the team successfully engineered the outer surface of SMAPs. This modification enables them to specifically recognize and target only tumor cells while sparing healthy tissues. The development and validation of this targeted technology convinced the ERC to award the PoC funding, which will now allow the team to test its clinical and industrial viability.