Politecnico di Milano awarded a 2024 ERC Proof of Concept grant
Paola Saccomandi, from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, was awarded the prestigious grant for her HyperSKIN project: a potentially revolutionary device to enhance detection, and treatment, in non-melanoma skin cancers (NMSC).
The 2024 ERC Proof of Concept will last 18 months and will help to boost the commercializing process of HyperSKIN through a technical-commercial feasibility study, including a market and health technology assessment and an intellectual property protection strategy, followed by the identification of the best exploitation strategy to valorize the know-how.
The aim of the HyperSKIN project is to develop a contactless device that revolutionizes the decision-making regarding excisional margins before and during the procedure of surgical removal, with instantaneous feedback on the skin regions to be preserved and the tumoral parts to be removed.
Acting like a digital biopsy through the identification of tissue biomarkers, the system enhances the precision in tumor margin detection at the micrometric scale, addressing the critical issue of positive margins and improving the precision of light-based NMSC treatments through optimization of laser light settings.
This could lead towards a no collateral damage treatment, like the complete removal of tumoral margins, minimizing damage to healthy tissues around, with short procedure times and high clinical outcome.
In skin cancer, recurrences and consequent need for repeated surgery are mainly associated with incomplete excision and positive tumor margins persistence. So, innovative approaches like light-based therapies are considered safe and effective options for many NMSC cases.
To overcome the lack of intraoperative monitored NMSC treatments, I benefited from the hyperspectral imaging system I experimented in the ERC LASER OPTIMAL project, for intraoperative monitoring of light-based treatment of tumors relying on temperature-dependent optical biomarkers of tissues.
Paola Saccomandi, Professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering
Through the ERC PoC call, the European Research Council (ERC) funds excellent frontier research projects, complementary to the main ERC, with the aim of bringing the first results of basic research to the market.
With the ERC PoC just obtained, the primacy of the Politecnico grows further, confirming itself as the first Italian university for funding received under the Horizon Europe programme with 315 projects for a total of about 156,339,749.79 euros.
As part of the Horizon Europe 2021-2028 funding framework programme, Politecnico di Milano has so far obtained 36 ERC projects for a total of 38,177,534.00 euros.