November 6th, 2025
Professor João Mano will be the corresponding Principal Investigator of the RODIN project, funded by a 10 M€ European Research Council Synergy Grant (ERC-SyG), that will explore how living cells can become the architects of future biomaterials.
RODIN – Cell-mediated Sculptable Living Platforms proposes a shift in tissue engineering: instead of scientists designing materials for cells, the project will give cells materials they can actively shape, record what they do, and learn the rules behind that behaviour. The central scientific challenge is to understand how cells physically and biologically remodel their surroundings and to turn that knowledge into principles for creating more efficient, life-like biomaterials.
The consortium brings together three leading researchers with highly complementary expertise: Professor João Mano (University of Aveiro and Associated Laboratory, CICECO-Aveiro Institute of Materials, Leader of the COMPASS Research Group, Portugal), a biomaterials engineer; Professor Tom Ellis (Imperial College London, UK), a synthetic biologist; and Professor Nuno Araújo (Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal), a physicist specialising in complex systems. Together they will rethink how materials and living systems co-evolve.
From passive scaffolds to cell-shaped materials
For decades, biomaterials for medicine have mostly been designed by humans, often through slow, formulation-by-formulation testing that does not fully capture what cells actually need. This approach has clear limits. Cells in embryos or in regenerating tissues do not wait for a perfect scaffold. They pull, push, fold, secrete and reorganise their microenvironment until it fits their developmental programme.
RODIN will recreate something similar in the lab. The team will develop very thin, flexible and sculptable biomaterial films that living cells can deform while they grow. As the cells organise, they will leave an imprint in the material. By analysing the structures that cells create when they are asked to form a certain tissue, the project aims to discover the key geometric and mechanical cues that cells themselves consider ideal. This is the core challenge: to decode the architectural rules that cells apply instinctively and to reuse those rules to design better materials.
From art to science
The project name is a tribute to the sculptor Auguste Rodin, who mastered the representation of human form and movement. In an analogous way, RODIN wants to understand how cells sculpt their surroundings with precision and purpose, and to capture that dynamism in materials science.
A Fusion of Disciplines and Technologies
To meet this challenge, RODIN combines:
Biomaterials engineering to create ultra-thin, reconfigurable films that are sensitive to cell forces.
Synthetic biology to embed controllable biological functions in those films and to guide cell behaviour from within.
Computational physics and machine learning to model how mechanics, geometry and biochemistry interact, and to extract rules from large datasets of cell-material interactions.
This integration is what makes the project possible. Only by observing cell-driven reshaping in well-defined materials, and by analysing it quantitatively, can the team move from trial-and-error biomaterials to rule-based biomaterials.
Why it matters
If successful, RODIN will open a new way of engineering living systems. Materials and cells will no longer be in a one-way relationship where the material hosts the cells. Instead, both will adapt to each other. This could lead to: smarter scaffolds for tissue regeneration; more realistic tissue models for disease; faster drug testing platforms, and a reduction in animal experimentation.
As the project leaders put it: “Cells are nature’s engineers. If we give them the right tools and listen carefully to what they build, we can learn their own blueprints.”
RODIN is funded under the European Research Council Synergy scheme, which supports groups of outstanding researchers who join forces to tackle problems so ambitious that they cannot be solved by a single principal investigator. As with all ERC grants, scientific excellence is the sole selection criterion, complemented in Synergy projects by the need for genuine, interdependent collaboration among the partners.
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