Transparency note: AI-assisted tools were used to support the drafting of this article.
Members of the Piezo4Spine consortium travelled to Antwerp, Belgium, from 7–11 September 2026 to take part in the 35th Annual Conference of the European Society for Biomaterials (ESB 2026), held at the Flanders Meeting and Convention Center. With more than 1,000 participants from across Europe and beyond, ESB is one of the leading international meetings bringing together chemists, physicists, biologists, biomaterials scientists, clinicians and industry to advance the development of innovative solutions for tissue and organ repair.
Piezo4Spine was represented by colleagues from two of its partner institutions, CSIC (Conchi Serrano, Julia Martínez, Dania Droubi and Patricia Valdés Portas) and the University of Coimbra (Lino Ferreira, Susana Simoes and Laura Sofia Carvalho), several of whom took the stage or presented posters on the project’s latest results in spinal cord injury (SCI) repair.
Oral presentations
- Julia Martínez (CSIC) — “Exploring bioactive scaffolds in Spinal Cord Injury rat models targeting neuroinflammation and regeneration”, presented on Thursday, 10 September, in the session “Biomaterial-driven tissue regeneration and aging,” Queen Elisabeth Hall.
- Susana Simoes (UC) — “Non-viral CRISPR/Cas9-based nanoformulation to gene editing aged cells”, presented on Tuesday, 8 September, in the session “Biomaterials for Drug Delivery Systems,” Darwin Hall.
- Laura Sofia Carvalho (UC) — “mRNA polyplexes for tackling fibrosis in the context of spinal cord injury”, presented on Wednesday, 9 September, in the session “Biomaterials translated to the clinic,” Gorilla Room 4.
Poster presentations
- Dania Droubi (CSIC) — “Optimization and in vitro exploration of chitosan 3D-printed scaffolds for neural repair”.
- Patricia Valdés Portas (CSIC) — “Improving neurite outgrowth in vitro by superparamagnetic nanoparticles loaded with nerve growth factor”.
- Susana Simoes (UC) — “Reprogramming brain tissue using CRISPR-based nanoformulation”, in addition to her oral presentation above.
Presenting this work to the wider European biomaterials community is an important step in sharing the project’s progress and connecting with researchers working on related approaches to neural repair.
More information on ESB 2026: esb2026.org
More information on Piezo4Spine: piezo4spine.eu
