EIC TRANSITION
Grant agreement ID
101058056
CORDIS
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101058056
Coordinated by
Lucero AB
Funded under
The European Innovation Council (EIC)
Total cost
€ 1 298 712,50
EU contibution
€ 1 298 712,50
Start date
1 January 2023
End date
31 December 2025
Purpose and goal
Personalised medicine has become a key focus for the pharmaceutical industry as it can address global health challenges, such as strong variations of drug efficacy and toxicity linked to different patient subgroups. A major challenge that pharmaceutical companies still face is the lack of enabling technologies they need to evaluate drug candidates in patients before entering clinical trials.
Lucero enables them to take the next step towards personalised treatments by providing a novel cell-handling platform that combines microfluidics, optical tweezers and artificial intelligence. Our technology is tailored to pre-clinical drug screening procedures for which patient-derived 3D cell cultures have to be automatically selected, isolated, and prepared for drug testing at high throughput speed, in line with their scalability requirements.
Grant agreement ID
CORDIS
Coordinated by
Funded under
Total cost
EU contibution
Start date
End date
101058056
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101058056
Lucero AB
The European Innovation Council (EIC)
€ 1 298 712,50
€1 298 712,50
1 January 2023
31 December 2025
Purpose and goal
Personalised medicine has become a key focus for the pharmaceutical industry as it can address global health challenges, such as strong variations of drug efficacy and toxicity linked to different patient subgroups. A major challenge that pharmaceutical companies still face is the lack of enabling technologies they need to evaluate drug candidates in patients before entering clinical trials.
Lucero enables them to take the next step towards personalised treatments by providing a novel cell-handling platform that combines microfluidics, optical tweezers and artificial intelligence. Our technology is tailored to pre-clinical drug screening procedures for which patient-derived 3D cell cultures have to be automatically selected, isolated, and prepared for drug testing at high throughput speed, in line with their scalability requirements.
Expected results and effects
During our ERC PoC project, we developed an integrated benchtop device for handling single 3D cell cultures inside an in-vitro environment. Lucero will build on this achievement by expanding our prototype’s functionalities to automatically detect cell culture viability, fully automate their isolation, and adapt the design of every core component to match the drug screening workflow.
Lucero’s technology fills the need of the pharmaceutical industry by providing a micromanipulation method for precisely handling targeted 3D cell models, while ensuring spheroid viability and downstream compatibility with standardized well-plate handling equipment.
Lucero combines artificial intelligence, optical tweezers, and microfluidics into an integrated platform for the identification, isolation, and preparation of single spheroids for drug discovery assays. This will enable pharmaceutical companies to pre-select viable spheroids from a heterogeneous sample, completely isolate them inside each well of a standard well plate at a high-throughput speed, and prepare them for downstream screening protocols in an automated fashion while achieving fast data acquisition times.
Target UN Sustainability goals
Lucero’s development will be in accordance with the UN Goals for Sustainable Development. In particular, with goal 3.B: to support research development and universal access to affordable vaccines and medicine, and goal 9.5: to enhance research and upgrade industrial technologies.
We plan to work with these goals by providing an accessible tool for pharmaceutical companies to enable the use of 3D cell models across multiple therapeutic areas to drive the development of new, personalised vaccines, and medicines.
Moreover, our novel industrial technology will be used to enhance the quality of current research and allow for new experiments that are currently not possible.