Professor Christian Heinis at EPFL’s School of Basic Sciences has been awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC).The ERC Advanced Grants are a highly prestigious funding scheme managed by the European Research Council (ERC) designed for active researchers with a proven track record of significant achievements who want to pursue long-term, groundbreaking, and high-risk frontier research projects in Europe. Each grant covers up to €2.5 million per project for a maximum of 5 years.The ERC has announced the Advanced Grant winners from the 2025 round of applications. Eight projects have been awarded at EPFL, one of which belongs to Professor Christian Heinis at the School of Basic Sciences (Institute of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering).Project: DRUGGABLEChristian Heinis plans to develop a transformative technology for discovering drugs against currently “undruggable” disease targets. His vision is to generate cyclic peptides capable of crossing cellular membranes and modulating challenging intracellular proteins, including protein–protein interactions that have largely resisted conventional drug discovery approaches. To achieve this goal, he will develop an innovative DNA-encoded library technology that enables the creation and screening of unprecedentedly large and chemically diverse collections of cyclic peptides containing more than 100 million compounds. These libraries will be applied to major disease targets, including KRAS, MCL-1, β-catenin, STAT3 and MYC.Heinis expects the project to yield new membrane-permeable ligands for several of these targets and to provide valuable starting points for therapeutic development. More broadly, the resulting technologies are intended to establish a widely applicable platform for drug discovery in academia and industry, opening new opportunities to treat diseases that currently lack effective therapies.“I hope that the new method will allow us to inhibit disease targets that are currently tagged as ‘undruggable’”, says Heinis. “If successful, this approach has the potential to enable the efficient modulation of intracellular proteins by membrane-permeable cyclic peptides, analogous to the way monoclonal antibodies have transformed the targeting of extracellular proteins.”