BOTS

The BOTS project wants to make brand new hydrogels using sea goodies from the sea, like fish, crustaceans, and algae, to use in fancy cell experiments. Regular hydrogels have some issues, so the team is getting creative.

They're adding special things like peptides and ligands to make these hydrogels just right for growing specific types of cells and even for 3D printing experiments. The goal is to make these marine hydrogels in a way that can be used on a big scale for testing new drugs, especially using 3D printing machines.

A team of experts in marine biology, chemistry, biophysics, and 3D culture are working together on this. And guess what? If this works out, there's a chance for creating new jobs in the Atlantic Area, thanks to the big market for 3D culture being worth more than €1 billion every year.

The project envisions setting up two small businesses: one for making a lot of these marine hydrogels, and another for testing personalized medicine using these hydrogels.