ERC Synergy Grant for Hereon researcher Christian Cyron
The MechVivo ERC synergy grant proposal submitted by Professor Christian Cyron together with colleagues from TU Graz and ETH Zurich is in line to receive funding of 10 million euros. Hereon is central corresponding host institution.
The MechVivo project aims to develop a new method for determining the mechanical properties of living tissues in the human body. Prof Christian Cyron from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon will be coordinating the project, collaborating with Prof Gerhard A. Holzapfel from Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) and Prof Sebastian Kozerke of ETH Zurich. For their joint project the scientists are in line to be awarded a Synergy Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). The total funding will be around 10 million euros with 2.7 million euros allocated to Hereon.
Biomechanical computer simulations promise transformative impact in clinical healthcare. However, so far they are only rarely used in practice. The problem: to attain reliable biomechanical computer simulations, the mechanical properties of the biological tissues involved must be known. As these vary greatly from patient to patient they are thus typically not known.
This is where Prof Christian Cyron and his colleagues Prof Gerhard A. Holzapfel (TU Graz) and Prof Sebastian Kozerke (ETH Zurich) will focus their research in the project MechVivo, standing for: Mechanical characterization of soft tissue in vivo by microstructural imaging and physics-informed neural networks: bridging the gap between biomechanics and clinical practice. The project is scheduled to start in 2025 and will run for six years.
New MRI technology and software
In a first step, a new clinical relevant magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) concept will be developed by Sebastian Kozerke and his team at the Institute for Biomedical Engineering at ETH Zurich and the University Zurich. The approach will allow the mapping of diffusion-dependent relaxation properties in a way that will yield a fingerprint of the composition and microstructure of tissue in the beating heart. The work requires substantial methodological advances in MRI sequence simulation, design and data reconstruction to transform the concept into a reliable in-vivo imaging tool. To interpret the tissue property fingerprint, a comprehensive understanding of the microstructure and mechanical properties of biological tissues and in particular of the relation between both is needed.
To achieve this, the TU Graz team will contribute expertise in experimental biomechanics: Gerhard A. Holzapfel's research group at the Institute of Biomechanics will work on gaining a fundamental understanding of the relationship between gene expression, microstructure and the mechanical properties of soft biological tissue. The researchers will map the tissue composition down to the nanometer range in order to draw conclusions about the mechanical properties. Ex vivo mechanical tests and microscopic analyses will be performed on pig hearts and human donor organs. These test loads are very similar to the conditions in the living body, which means that the mechanical properties of the organs can be determined in an extraordinarily realistic manner.
At Hereon, Christian Cyron and his team at the Institute of Material Systems Modeling will develop software that converts the data collected in Zurich and Graz into medically useful knowledge. It will be based on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) and designed to unravel the relationship between the microstructural fingerprints collected by MRI on the one hand and the actual mechanical properties of tissues on the other. The aim is to derive mechanical properties of tissues in vivo from the microstructural and compositional information collected by the novel MRI technology developed in this project. The knowledge about the mechanical properties in vivo that can be gained this way can be used to parametrize computer simulations that can support clinical diagnosis and treatment e.g. in the form of new implantable devices.
Benefits for future healthcare
The principal investigators will collaborate closely with preclinical and clinical imaging experts at the University Zurich, the Medical University Graz and the University Hospital Zurich to develop and apply the methodology. The benefits for clinical healthcare will be evaluated in a clinical study working with Prof. Robert Manka at the University Hospital Zurich, focusing on heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, one of the most important causes of cardiac mortality and morbidity worldwide. According to Cyron, MechVivo aims to develop a completely new operating principle to determine the mechanical properties of tissues in living organisms non-invasively. "If the project is successful, it could lead to a breakthrough in making biomechanical computer simulations much more usable in clinical practice."
Cyron is the director of the Institute of Material Systems Modeling at Hereon and Head of the Institute of Continuum and Material Mechanics at Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH). The research work of MechVivo has potential to feed into the TUHH led application for a cluster of excellence (currently in evalulation) in Water-driven Materials – BlueMat - in which Hereon is participating.
The ERC Synergy Grant
The four frontier grants of the European Research Council (ERC) - the Starting Grant, Consolidator Grant, Advanced Grant, and Synergy Grant - are generally considered to be among the highest distinctions researchers across all disciplines can receive in Europe. Scientific excellence is the sole criterion according to which these grants are awarded. Among the four frontier grants, the Synergy Grants are by far the largest ones and the ones awarded most rarely. In the 2024 ERC Synergy Grant call, marginally over 10 percent of applications received funding. The ERC requires that "the transformative research funded by Synergy Grants should have the potential of becoming a benchmark on a global scale."
Wissenschaftlicher Ansprechpartner:
Prof. Christian Cyron
Principal Investigator
Institute of Material Systems Modeling
Phone: +49 (0)4152 87-2583
Mail: christian.cyron@hereon.de
Weitere Informationen:
http://Institute of Material Systems Modeling:
https://www.hereon.de/institutes/material_systems_modeling/index.php.en
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