Associação do Instituto Superior Tecnico para a Investigação e o Desenvolvimento
IST-ID is a private not-for-profit institution, founded by Instituto Superior Técnico of Universidade de Lisboa, which primarily aims at carrying out Science and Technology activities. IST-ID is the host institution of the Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences (iBB), the research institute where this project will be carried out. iBB is a multidisciplinary research centre whose mission is to promote cross-disciplinary research encompassing biology, chemistry, and engineering, to impact Human Health and Bioeconomy. More specifically, EURAS will be performed within the Stem Cell Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Research Group of iBB (SCERG-iBB), which aims at the development of platforms to produce biomolecules, cells, tissues and organs for repair and replacement in the human body or for in vitro tissue modeling and disease diagnosis, meeting the main challenges of Regenerative Medicine and the Biopharmaceutical industry. Research at SCERG-iBB relies on a cross-disciplinary strategy combining Bioprocess Engineering with Stem Cell Biology with activities focused on three areas: (A) Biology and Engineering of Pluripotent Stem Cells; (B) Development and Manufacturing of Cellular and Molecular Therapies; and (C) Biomaterials and Devices for Advanced Medicine.
Role within EURAS
IST-ID will biobank and distribute representative hiPSC lines modelling the three RASopathies under study in EURAS and respective controls. This includes hiPSCs available at the beginning of the project, from EURAS partners and collaborators, and hiPSCs that will be obtained through reprogramming and/or gene editing at IST-ID. IST-ID will also generate dorsal forebrain organoids from disease and control hiPSCs and perform their molecular, structural, and functional phenotyping envisaging the identification of disease biomarkers. These organoids and disease biomarkers will then be used to validate therapeutic compounds to mitigate or revert the disease’s phenotype.
