150,000 Euro Grant to Dr. Shai Bel of BIU

Dr. Shai Bel, from Bar-Ilan University’s Azrieli Faculty of Medicine, is the recipient of a European Research Council (ERC) Proof of Concept Grant of 150,00 Euro to explore the therapeutic potential of his discoveries related to inflammatory bowel diseases.

Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, are chronic conditions that affect 1% of the population in the industrialized world. Current IBD therapies only suppress the immune system, leading to serious adverse events, including life-threatening infections and cancers. Also, more than 50% of patients do not respond to all existing therapies.

While conducting their ERC-funded research, Dr. Bel and his team discovered a potential new approach to treat these diseases. "We found a way to induce mucus secretion from cells in the intestine which protects the tissue from bacteria, and allows the intestine to heal," says Dr. Bel. The newly-funded ERC Proof of Concept (PoC) Grant will allow Bel and team to test this novel approach in pre-clinical animal models, and determine whether it has the potential to treat patients in the clinic.

The Proof of Concept (PoC) Grant funds researchers previously or currently supported by the ERC, enabling them to advance their ideas from groundbreaking research towards innovation. The PoC Grant assists researchers in transitioning from frontier research discoveries to practical applications of the findings, including early commercialization phases.