Future electronics will take on more important roles in people’s lives, particulary, electronic-skin platforms appear as an attractive approach to enable advanced health monitoring, disease detection, and medical therapies. However, current electronics are rigid, nondegradable and cannot self-repair, while the human body is soft, dynamic, stretchable, biodegradable, and self-healing. The sensing components of electronic skin platforms usually rely on bulky power supplies to work, such as the traditional lithium-ion batteries, which are heavy, rigid, and toxic, limiting the practical utilization for electronic-skin. Other wearable power source include energy harvesting and selfpowered devices such as enzymatic biobatteries and biofuel cells, which are not suitable because they lack conformability, flexibility, thus restricting operational conditions. Coll-Bat aims to develop an innovative ultra-thin, flexible, and lightweight biobattery entirely made of collagen-like biomaterials able to supply electronic skin devices for health monitoring. 

IBD affects over 5 million people worldwide, and over 900 million suffer from obesity. These diseases share symptoms like intestinal inflammation and susceptibility to infections. Antibiotics and anti-inflammatory medications target these symptoms, but have the collateral effect of damaging native intestinal microbes (microbiota), reducing their capacity to protect the patient from consequent infections and promoting recurrent inflammatory episodes. Novel strategies are needed for therapies that target symptoms and/or protect the microbiota from damage, to complement or enhance antibiotic treatments. Probiotics have not yet been shown to be the solution to this issue. Here, we propose a next-generation probiotic therapy using a gut microbiota protective species that can target all three major symptoms of gut inflammatory diseases, by reducing inflammatory episodes, recovering the microbiota from imbalances, and resolving infections. This biotherapy has the potential to complement and enhance antibiotics, leading to patients’ faster and better recovery from disease state. 

Antimicrobial Resistance is one of the major public health threats worldwide. The situation is so serious that the world health organization (WHO) has established as a critical priority the development of new antibiotics against multidrug resistant (MDR) bacteria. Of particular concern are infections caused by MDR Klebsiella pneumoniae, for which therapeutic options are urgently needed. Herein we propose a new class of metal compounds (OMKP1), to use as a precision antibiotic against MDR K. pneumoniae infections. In this project we aim to take this compound into more advanced stages of development, namely by validating its activity in the lab and determining key physicochemical parameters and stability conditions. These data will guide the synthesis of optimized OMKP1 versions with increased activity and stability. Moreover, will enable to definitively establish OMKP1 as a promising chemical scafold for the treatment of MDR K. pneumoniae infections. 

As we all are experiencing, zoonotic viruses are unpredictable threats to human health. Innovative ways to identify, treat and prevent all viruses are in demand. Zika virus (ZIKV) is a newly emergent flavirus, closely linked to Dengue, Yellow Fever and Chikungunya viruses, mainly transmitted by the bite of infected mosquitoes. To date, there is no prophylactic treatment nor vaccine available against ZIKV and disease control is limited to vector eradication strategies. Researchers from ITQB NOVA, IGC and Fiocruz-PE, Brazil joined complementary expertise involving de novo design of proteins, molecular simulations, protein production, biophysics, immunology, virology and structural biology to successfully address the identified problems. The goal of this proposal is to elucidate 3D structures of computationally designed proteins comprising unique ZIKV epitopes and mimicking human neutralizing antibodies to boost the development of high-fidelity diagnostic tools, treatment of ZIKV infections and vaccines to stop virus dissemination, giving our proposal a significant edge of timeliness and novelty.

The menace of emerging infections, the recurrence of previous pandemics and the rise in antibiotic-resistant pathogens makes the continuous surveillance of pathogens, a critical axis in health policies. Versatile, cost-effective and easy to implement diagnostic tests are urgently needed to enable routine environmental monitoring and their large scale deployment should a pandemic situation arise. We propose the use of a nanoplatform for the display of enzymes to be used in LAMP-based tests, faster and simpler alternatives to traditional PCR tests, for the detection of pathogens. The platform uses Bacillus subtilis spores to display the two polymerases. In preliminary work, we successfully displayed an active RT at the spore surface. We now aim at displaying both polymerases at the spore surface, and to use the resulting spores for the simple, cost-effective detection of relevant pathogens.