Research funded by ERC
The European Research Council (ERC) provides highly competitive funding which currently supports 2 research teams led by top researchers at the University of Tartu. Both of them are an ERC Starting Grant.
European Research Council (ERC) grants support individual researchers who wish to pursue their frontier research. The ERC encourages in particular proposals that cross disciplinary boundaries, pioneering ideas that address new and emerging fields and applications that introduce unconventional, innovative approaches.
ERC Starting Grants aim to support up-and-coming research leaders who are about to establish a proper research team and to start conducting independent research in Europe.
Professor Lauri Mälksoo dr. iur
INTLAWRUSSIA
The central research question of our project is: what impact does the increasingly non-liberal orientation of the government of the Russian Federation have on the Russian doctrine and practice of international law?
As the West and Russia hope to further build their relationship on international law, is it still the same international law that they are talking about? We aim to provide systematic empirical evidence on the use and conceptualization of international law in the Russian Federation. But we intend to go further than that. The project has also a wider theoretical ambition since we intend to analyze the situation in Russia as an example of something beyond Russia itself, namely from the viewpoint of the question of how non-liberal States understand and practice international law. Whether non-liberal States 'behave worse' in respect to international law than liberal States is one of the most important debates in the post-Cold War international legal theory. To combine these two questions - Russia and how non-liberal States relate to international law - promises ground-breaking new insights. Our method includes, beside obvious classical tools of international legal research, using IR theories of constructivism and liberalism. Moreover, we will conduct interviews with Russian judges, politicians and legal academicians in order to get a more nuanced and realistic view on the conceptualization and use of international law in Russia. Besides the PI, the research team includes two post-doc scholars at the Faculty of Law of Tartu University. Three doctoral student positions are also foreseen in the project.
Professor Tambet Teesalu PHD
CliomaDDS - Brain tumor penetrating peptides
Our project addresses a major problem in therapy of solid tumors: poor penetration of anti-cancer drugs into tumor tissue and to infiltrating tumor cells.
Recently, we have identified tumor penetrating peptides (TPP) that trigger specific penetration of co-administered un-conjugated drugs deep into tumor and increase their therapeutic index. Current TPP target angiogenic tumor vessels and may not be suitable for targeting slow-growing tumors and invasive tumor cells. TPP are composed of functional modules (tumor recruitment motif, cryptic tissue penetrating C-end Rule element, and a protease cleavage site), which can be rearranged to yield peptides of novel specificities. Our goal is to develop TPP platform for delivery of co-administered drugs to the deadliest brain tumor – glioblastoma (GBM). High-grade glioma is a target that is particularly evasive and well-suited for tissue penetrative drug delivery. We will develop glioma-specific TPP (gTPP) by combination of in vivo and ex vivo phage display of constrained peptide libraries on state-of-the-art glioma animal models. These gTPP will be able to penetrate gliomas (and potentially other tumors) independent of their angiogenic status, and to deliver drugs to infiltrating malignant cells far from the bulk glioma lesion. We will characterize, validate, and optimize the gTPP platform for enhanced glioma delivery of co-injected drugs. These studies will provide the preclinical data needed to advance the gTPP combination therapy of glioma to GLP toxicology and subsequent IND filing.