Call for Collaborative seed projects 2025

The goal is to select innovative and collaborative projects which go beyond the current state of the art, that would be difficult to fund through conventional grants and that have the potential to be a leverage for further funding.

The EnLife project gathers PSL strengths to understand and engineer living systems at various levels of complexity and scales. By tinkering living systems, combining biological parts together, studying their emergent properties within cells and tissues and describing theoretically these properties, we ambition to learn fundamental concepts of life, to improve our capacity to control and to engineer living systems, to develop novel technologies to interact with cells and tissues, and to advance our understanding of how to design living systems artificially.

EnLife will fund up to 7 two-years projects with supporting grants of 150k€.

Conditions to apply

• The project must be carried out by permanent researchers from at least 2 different teams
• The project must represent a new effort for the participants and should not simply constitute an extension of on-going research.
• Each applicant can be part of several projects but can be main collaborator and receive funding from only one project and would be associated member in the other projects.
• No preliminary data are needed

Evaluation criteria

• Collaborative project
• Innovative nature of the project
• High risk nature of the project
• Potential to find other funding(s) following the project duration

Remarks

• Young researchers are highly encouraged to apply
• The funding will be awarded as a lump sum, all types of expenses are eligible for funding (equipment, salaries, travel, consumable, platform fees, publication fees); no provisional budget needed
• External collaborators can be associated to the project but will not be funded
• The project should not already be funded by another mean
• Duration of the project: 2 years

Selection of the funded projects

• There will be a 15min interview in front of a jury
• Interviews are “public” (all GP members are welcome to attend)
• The jury will include : GP leaders, PSL valorisation, members of the GP present at the meeting
   

Calendar

• November 2025: launch of the call
• February 1st, 2026: deadline for application
• February 18th, 2026: presentation of the project in front of a jury
• March 2026: announcement of the results and start of the projects
   

To apply, please fill out this online application form
If you have any question, please contact melissa.dewulf@curie.fr