Nov. 1 – Francesco Ricci, researcher at the Tor Vergata University (Rome), is one of the 2013 winners of the Starting Grant funding program, thanks to his project “Nature nanodevices,” nanomachines for cancer diagnosis and the identification of a targeted therapy. His grant amounts to €1.45 million and he is one of the 8 Italian researchers selected by the European Research Council. At the base of his “Nature nanodevices” project there is the idea of imitating nature’s mechanisms to detect signals from millions of different molecules in a complex physiological environment and apply them to cancer diagnosis and targeted therapeutic treatments. Thirty-six years old, with a doctorate in Chemistry in at Tor Vergata University, Francesco Ricci is one of the 8 Italian researchers, selected out of 287, who will benefit from the funding made available by the European Research Council (ERC) with the 6th Starting Grant Competition, the last under the 7th Framework Program.
