Professor Niamh Nowlan of University College Dublin (UCD) has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Proof of Concept Grant for research with the potential to enable new treatments for a broad range of paediatric growth disorders.

The ERC today announced funding for the first round of 2026 Proof of Concept Grants worth €27.3 million. The objective of the awards is to enable ERC-funded ideas to progress on the path from ground-breaking research towards innovation. 182 researchers will each receive a grant worth €150,000 to explore the commercial or societal potential of their research findings.

Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation, said, “Many of today's innovations begin with a researcher asking a fundamental question. These 182 projects show that curiosity-driven science and real-world impact go hand in hand. With Proof of Concept funding, ERC researchers can test how their discoveries could become new treatments, technologies, services or solutions that benefit people across Europe.”

Professor Maria Leptin, President of the European Research Council, said, “It turns out to have been a very good move by the ERC Scientific Council to introduce the top up funding ‘Proof of Concept’. By now, nearly 2500 such grants have helped our grantees explore the innovation potential of discoveries from their ERC-funded research. I am pleased to see a new round concluded - congratulations to all!”

The Proof of Concept grants aim to maximise the value of excellent ERC funded research, by funding further work to verify the innovation potential of ideas arising from these projects. The Grants are part of the EU's research and innovation programme, Horizon Europe.

The GROW-REG Project

Full Professor of Biomedical Engineering at UCD School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, and a fellow of the UCD Conway Institute, Professor Niamh Nowlan will lead the GROW-REG project (Identifying physeal cell surface markers for paediatric growth modulation).

Growth disorders due to genetic causes, infection or injury are common in children and can lead to limbs of unequal length, crooked bones, abnormal stature, and the associated pain, loss of function, self consciousness and impacts on self-esteem. Current treatments of growth disorders involve systemic drugs - affecting all cells in the body - or invasive surgeries, which can cause significant side effects or morbidity.

The physis, or growth plate, is the engine of growth in children's bones. This remarkable yet poorly understood type of cartilage disappears once a child has fully grown. Despite its central role in skeletal development, there is currently no strategy to selectively target the physis for therapeutic intervention. The GROW-REG project aims to identify cell surface markers which are specific to the physis, so that in future, there could be a drug treatment designed specifically to speed up, or slow down, growth of one or more bones (or parts of bones) without systemic drugs or surgeries.

The project builds on discoveries from the ERC-funded ReZone project led by Professor Nowlan, which revealed major transcriptomic differences between articular and physeal cartilage.

Professor Nowlan said, “Advancing basic research closer to patients (especially babies and children), is hugely rewarding and we are excited to get started. By creating the foundation for a targeted delivery platform capable of modulating growth plate activity with high anatomical precision, we hope to ultimately enable new treatments for a broad range of paediatric growth disorders, reduce reliance on invasive surgery, and improve the safety and specificity of existing biologic therapies.

“I would like to thank my research group, especially Ms Jemma Falkov and Ms Giulia Giuffredi, the Conway Institute, collaborator Prof Pieter Brama, Dr Mark d'Alton in the UCD Biomedical Facility, Dr Margherita Castronovo in the UCD Research Office, Róisín Scallan in NovaUCD, clinical collaborators Prof Connor Green and Dr Ciara McDonnell, and members of the UCD Centre for Children's Orthopaedic Research & Innovation (CORI), and of course the ERC for their continued support of frontier research.”