Niels Bohr Institute Wins Flagship European Grant for the Physics of Living Matter

Around 100 research teams from across Europe competed for the Novo Nordisk Foundation's most prestigious scientific challenge grant. The award goes to a consortium led by Amin Doostmohammadi at the Niels Bohr International Academy, together with three world-leading partners: Nikta Fakhri at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Erwin Frey at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, and Xavier Trepat at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia in Barcelona. 

"We are very proud to have secured this grant in what was a truly tough European competition," says Doostmohammadi. "More than anything, it is a tribute to the exceptional colleagues I get to do science with. The programme was previously open only to Danish institutions, and to win it now, in its first European edition, means a great deal to all of us."

Life's one-way current

Every cell in your body is constantly doing something: pulling, pushing, signalling to its neighbours, committing to a fate. Somehow, from all this local activity, organised tissues emerge. Without having any central controller, organs form, wounds heal, tumours invade. How? That is the question ALIVE sets out to answer.

The centre's central idea is that living tissues are information-processing systems. The forces cells exert, the signals they send, the identities they adopt — all of these carry information, and that information flows in a specific direction through time. Just as a river has a current, living tissue dynamics have a preferred temporal direction: causes precede effects in measurable ways. Physicists call this an arrow of time. ALIVE will turn this collective arrow of time into a quantitative tool for understanding and ultimately controlling how tissues behave.

The flow of information within living systems, and the fact that this flow has a direction, is the idea at the heart of our approach, If we can measure and map that flow, we can begin to predict when tissues will function normally, when they will fail, and how we might intervene.".

Four systems, from sea sponges to human embryoids

The consortium will study four biological systems that together span a range of multicellular life: sea sponges, representing the earliest origins of animal multicellularity; intestinal organoids, as a model of healthy tissue renewal; colorectal cancer organoids, where collective organisation breaks down; and human embryoids based on human induced pluripotent stem cells, where the emergence of the body plan can be observed and experimentally controlled.

Across all four, the team will combine force measurements, live imaging, molecular tools, and new theoretical frameworks from non-equilibrium physics to extract, model, and ultimately steer the information flows that govern tissue organisation.

A six-year programme built for discovery

ALIVE will run for six years and will recruit a substantial cohort of PhD students and postdoctoral researchers across all four partner institutions. The centre's launch will take place in April 2027 at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.