image: Edoardo Albisetti
Credit: Politecnico di Milano
27 January 2026 - Three projects by professors and researchers at the Politecnico di Milano have received funding under ERC Proof of Concept grants. PROTECT, by Alessandro Filippo Maria Pellegata (Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering), aims to fill a knowledge gap with respect to drug safety in pregnancy. META-SENSE, conducted by the Department of Physics and coordinated by Margherita Maiuri, aims to develop a nanosensor to detect PFAS. Finally, the goal of the LANTERN project is to develop a method for microchip nanofabrication. It is led by Edoardo Albisetti, a professor in the Department of Physics.
The European Research Council (ERC) subsidises outstanding projects on the frontiers of research through the ERC PoC call, which supplements primary ERC grants with the aim of bringing the first results of basic research to the market.
The Politecnico’s record expands with these new ERC PoC grants, confirming its position as Italy’s leading university in terms of funding received under the Horizon Europe programme, with 389 projects for a total of €185.68 million.
Under funding through the Horizon Europe 2021–2027 framework programme, the Politecnico di Milano has been awarded 44 ERC projects totalling €44.65 million.
PROTECT
Drug safety in pregnancy is still one of the least explored and most critical areas of medicine. Pregnant women are generally excluded from clinical studies and animal models often cannot reliably predict the effects of drugs on human foetuses. As a result, many treatments are avoided during pregnancy not because they have been proven to be harmful, but because there is a lack of adequate scientific data, leading to important clinical and social consequences.
The PROTECT project, led by Alessandro Filippo Maria Pellegata, aims to fill this gap by developing an innovative platform based on three-dimensional models of human foetal tissue made with a 3D bioprinter. Using cells derived from amniotic fluid, the system recreates human tissues in the laboratory to reproduce key phases of foetal development, enabling the systematic assessment of drug toxicity under controlled, reproducible conditions.
With this approach, the ability to predict the actual risks of drugs on human foetuses will be improved while reducing the use of animal testing. PROTECT thus aims to contribute to safer, more inclusive medicine in pregnancy by providing new tools to support more informed and evidence-based treatment decisions.
The project originated in the LaBS - 3D Bioprinting and Tissue Engineering Lab in the DCMC at the Politecnico di Milano, in collaboration with Day One.
Alessandro Filippo Maria Pellegata teaches in the DCMC at the Politecnico di Milano and is Principal Investigator of the LaBS – 3D Bioprinting and Tissue Engineering laboratory, where he coordinates research activities in the field of regenerative medicine and advanced biological models. Over the years, his research has broadened progressively, integrating bioengineering, cell biology and advanced materials to develop tissue regeneration solutions, particularly for paediatric and prenatal diseases. This led him to gain international experience at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health in London, where he contributed to developing engineered organs and studying the mechanisms that regulate blood vessel formation and function. In 2024, he received an ERC Consolidator Grant to develop a new tissue engineering strategy for the treatment of spina bifida.
META-SENSE
The goal of META-SENSE, a project by Margherita Maiuri, is to develop a compact, regenerable, label-free nanosensor to detect a particular class of chemical contaminants called PFAS.
PFAS, an acronym for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are synthetic chemical compounds widely used in industry and consumer goods due to their resistance to heat and water. This resistance, however, makes them extremely persistent, hence the nickname ‘forever chemicals’. Today, PFAS are among the most widespread contaminants, found in water, soil and air around the world. Tightening regulations and growing awareness of the health and environmental risks of PFAS contamination are fuelling an urgent demand for quick and accurate analytical solutions, which conventional approaches struggle to satisfy.
The META-SENSE project will result in a compact, regenerable nanosensor to directly detect PFAS in water within minutes. Based on state-of-the-art optical metasurfaces, the device will enable rapid, in-situ quantification, reducing the dependence on centralised laboratory analysis.
META-SENSE will support scalable water-quality monitoring, making environmental diagnostics more accessible and speeding up decision-making for screening and remediation, thereby facilitating the transition of the proposed technology to future industrial applications.
Margherita Maiuri is a professor in the Department of Physics at the Politecnico di Milano, where she coordinates research in ultrafast spectroscopy applied to biomimetic systems and optical nanostructures. She obtained her PhD in Physics at the Politecnico di Milano, specialising in ultrafast optics applied to biomolecules. She was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship and worked at Princeton University on ultrafast multidimensional electron spectroscopy. She was awarded a European ERC Starting Grant in 2022 for the ULYSSES project. Her main research interests, which are supported by national and international funding, include the study of complex systems to convert light into molecular structures, ultrafast optical metasurfaces and strong light-matter interactions.
LANTERN
The development of ICT technologies requires new approaches to microchip fabrication to overcome the limitations of conventional nanolithography. In particular, signal processing and transmission in next-generation electronic and photonic devices require nanostructuring of key materials, such as complex oxides, which is still difficult to achieve via standard clean-room processes.
The LANTERN project, led by Edoardo Albisetti, aims to develop and demonstrate a radically innovative nanofabrication method based on a highly focused laser beam that can modulate the functional properties of complex oxides (e.g. magnetic and optical) locally in three dimensions with sub-micrometre precision.
The effectiveness of the method will be tested by developing a prototype to filter radio-frequency signals and then extending this to other systems of technological interest, such as magnetic memories and photonic devices. Overall, the project aims to pave the way for industrial adoption of the technology and subsequent developments, including scalability for technology transfer initiatives.
Edoardo Albisetti is a professor in the Department of Physics at the Politecnico di Milano and Principal Investigator in the PhyND research group. He earned his PhD in Physics at the Politecnico di Milano and spent time as a visiting student at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia (USA). He was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center and New York University in New York. He received an ERC Starting Grant in 2021 for the B3YOND project. His main research interests lie in developing innovative methodologies to control the physical properties of condensed matter at the nanoscale, with the aim of designing and building new materials and devices with advanced functionality and low energy impacts.
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