ERC Advanced Grants awarded to two researchers from the SynCellEU community
On 23 June 2026, the European Research Council (ERC) announced the 319 winners of its latest ‘Advanced Grant’ competition. This year, Andreas Walther, from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in Germany, and Wilhelm Huck, from Radboud University in the Netherlands, were awarded funding for their respective projects, ProtoEco and MolCompute. They will each receive over 2.5 million in funding over five years. The ERC Advanced Grants are part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme.
Andreas Walther’s project: Protoecologies between Artificial Cells and Mammalian Cells (ProtoEco)
Can artificial materials one day coexist with natural cells? The ProtoEco project aims to develop artificial cells that can interact with natural cells, influence them, and in turn be influenced by them.
At the heart of the project are so-called protoecologies, i.e., artificially constructed micro-communities composed of artificial and natural cells. These systems are intended to communicate with each other, support one another, and jointly give rise to new properties.
The project seeks to better understand how life-like behaviour can emerge from chemically designed systems as well as to lay the foundations for intelligent biomaterials, tissue engineering, adaptive immunotherapies, and, in the long term, even programmable probiotics.
For more information, read the press release from JGU: “ERC Advanced Grants for two researchers of Mainz University”
Wilhelm Huck’s project: Reservoir computing in living and synthetic enzymatic reaction networks (MolCompute)
Living systems can process complex information from their environment. Wilhelm Huck’s project aims to develop synthetic molecular systems that mimic the information-processing capabilities of living systems.
The researchers will address key bottlenecks in training and scaling of molecular information processing systems that are required for the development of a super-critical scale-up of computational capabilities.
For more information, read the press release from Radboud University: “Third ERC Advanced Grant for Wilhelm Huck”