The BuonMarrow project, presented by the research group of Prof. Marco Rasponi from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering at the Politecnico di Milano, has been selected by the European Innovation Council (EIC) among the 53 winning proposals of the EIC Pathfinder Open 2023 call, endowed with a total budget of nearly 170 million euros.

The selected projects will develop innovative technology solutions in a number of strategic areas, including healthcare, artificial intelligence, computing, environment and energy, and will benefit from dedicated acceleration pathways and grants.

Specifically, BuonMarrow aims to find a solution to the problem of the early diagnosis of lung cancer relapse, which currently, in the absence of tools to predict its risk, is only diagnosed late on the basis of radiological evidence, drastically reducing patients’ survival rate.

BuonMarrow lays on the groundbreaking hypothesis, supported by preliminary clinical evidence, that bone marrow mesenchymal stromal cells (BM-MSC) may be educated upon cancer mediators’ exposure, and acquire a long-term memory-like response which is amplified when exposed to a secondary tumor. Owing to breakthrough technologies such as organ-on-chip, innovative optical sensors and biological modeling of the bone marrow niche, BuonMarrow partners will develop an in vitro miniaturized bone marrow device able to harness the amplified BM-MSC response generated by liquid biopsy of lung cancer patients, thus acting as a biological sensor for the early detection of relapse. A combination of retrospective and prospective clinical studies will allow to calibrate and validate such sensor, delivering an unprecedented tool to assist the decision-making process on lung cancer patients.

The BuonMarrow consortium is coordinated by Politecnico di Milano and includes Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori (Italy), Lund University (Sweden) and the Institute for Bioengineering of Calatonia (Spain).