Anne-Vir­ginie Sal­sac, a CNRS research sci­en­tist who is still work­ing at the UTC BMBI (bio­me­chan­ics and bio-engi­neer­ing) Lab. was award­ed a “Con­sol­ida­tor Grant” by the Euro­pean Research Coun­cil (ERC), this being a grant that goes to “young research sci­en­tists”, between 2 to 12 years after gain­ing their PhD. This ERC Grant is a “first” for UTC. 

The ERC grant is a finan­cial aid, max­i­mum amount 2 Meu­ros over a 5 year peri­od, was award­ed to Prof Cécile Legal­lais for her project apper­tain­ing to the behav­iour of deformable liq­uid core micro­cap­sules intro­duced in liv­ing organisms. 

The Con­sol­ida­tor Grant rep­re­sents a strong recog­ni­tion for this expert in human body flu­id bio­me­chan­ics whose career path has already been marked by numer­ous awards (among which the CNRS 2015 Bronze Medal). Her research n vas­cu­lar flow phe­nom­e­na over more than 15 years have led to her now hav­ing a world-class rep­u­ta­tion in this field. Her cur­rent research activ­i­ties at UTC aims at improv­ing med­ical drug deliv­ery vec­tors to increase effi­cien­cy and decrease unwant­ed side-effects. 

The objec­tive is to gain a bet­ter con­trol as to the site where the ther­a­peu­tic mol­e­cules are to be released and to dose more accu­rate­ly the quan­ti­ties of drugs deliv­ered to that pre­cise spot. “In order to achieve this, we must be able to con­trol the mechan­i­cal ‘viz. defor­ma­tions) of the micro­cap­sule vec­tors to deliv­er the drugs to exact­ly where we want”, she explains. The approach adopt­ed con­sists of using both dig­i­tal and exper­i­men­tal mod­els to sim­u­late flu­id cir­cu­la­tion and micro­cap­sule defama­tion in our diges­tive tract and our blood ves­sels. The com­ing inves­ti­ga­tions will con­cern devices deliv­er­ing betaine, in par­tic­u­lar, this mol­e­cule being a syn­the­sized anti-oxi­diz­er obtained from sug­ar beets. Cf. the UTC- BMBI web-site at https://bmbi.utc.fr A video-inter­view “Un ERC Con­sol­ida­tor Grant pour Anne-Vir­ginie Sal­sac” dubbed in Eng­lish at webtv.utc.fr A video inter­view Cecile Legal­lais, “Le foie bio-arti­fi­cial” [the arti­fi­cial liv­er], dubbed in Eng­lish at : http://hypervideo.utc.fr