ISAR Bioscience at the EIC Sum­mit 2025

Great recog­ni­tion: Martha Som­mer, team leader at ISAR Bioscience, has been invited to present the Uni­S­ens pro­ject at the EIC Sum­mit 2025.

The meet­ing of the European Innov­a­tion Coun­cil EIC took place in Brus­sels on April 2 and 3. Martha Som­mer presen­ted Uni­S­ens to the con­fer­ence par­ti­cipants from sci­ence, busi­ness, EU admin­is­tra­tion and polit­ics. With the sum­mit, the EIC, an agency of the European Com­mis­sion, wants to pro­mote vis­ion­ary, rad­ic­ally new, high-risk ideas with sus­tain­able poten­tial for change and to sup­port their mar­ket launch.

The Uni­S­ens pro­ject is about a com­pletely new tech­no­logy for the devel­op­ment of drugs. Spe­cific­ally, drugs that tar­get so-called G-pro­tein-coupled recept­ors, GPCRs. There are hun­dreds of types of these recept­ors, and they are the most import­ant tar­gets for thera­peutic drugs. For example, beta-block­ers, opi­ates and the new weight-loss drugs exert their effects at such recept­ors. Every year, the phar­ma­ceut­ical industry spends bil­lions of euros to find new drugs that act on GPCRs. How­ever, this is done using many dif­fer­ent assay meth­ods that are mostly dec­ades old.

The Uni­S­ens pro­ject team aims to develop a single, uni­ver­sal method to determ­ine how a drug activ­ates GPCRs. The innov­at­ive concept is based on aca­demic research by Martin Lohse and by Martha Som­mer, head of the “Sig­nal­ing Plat­form” at ISAR Bioscience. A spe­cial fea­ture of the Uni­S­ens method is that it will provide inform­a­tion suit­able for AI ana­lyses. This will greatly accel­er­ate drug development.

The Uni­S­ens con­sor­tium con­sists of an equal num­ber of biotech com­pan­ies and aca­demic labor­at­or­ies. It includes lead­ing GPCR experts from Spain, the Czech Repub­lic, France, the Neth­er­lands and Switzer­land. Uni­S­ens is fun­ded by the EIC with around 3 mil­lion euros. In addi­tion, the Swiss team will receive about 700,000 euros.