Dr Lu Cheng, Academy Research Fellow at the Institute of Biomedicine, University of Eastern Finland, has secured a share of the prestigious European Innovation Council (EIC) Pathfinder Open 2025 funding. He will serve as Co-Principal Investigator in the RamanProSeq project exploring plasmonic nanopore technologies for automatic manipulation and Raman spectroscopic sequencing of single proteins.
The three-year project aims to pioneer a new generation of optical sequencing technology that can read single protein molecules directly using plasmonic nanopore devices combined with Raman spectroscopy. Such technology could revolutionise proteomics, early disease diagnostics and personalised medicine.
Highly competitive EIC Pathfinder Open selection
The RamanProSeq project was selected in the EIC Pathfinder Open 2025 call, where only 2,1% of proposals were funded. The total project budget is 3 million euros, of which 264,000 euros is allocated to UEF.
The project is coordinated by the University of Oulu (Finland) and involves an international consortium including University of Eastern Finland (Finland), Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (Portugal), RWTH Aachen University (Germany), Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italy), and Nottingham Trent University (United Kingdom).
UEF’s contribution: algorithms for protein sequencing
At UEF, Dr Lu Cheng leads the development of the peptide basecalling algorithms, i.e., computational methods that translate Raman spectral signals from the nanopore device into amino-acid sequence reads.
“This funding enables us to bridge physics-based sensing with AI-driven methods for decoding biological signals,” says Dr Cheng. “It’s an exciting opportunity to contribute to a technology that could fundamentally change how we study proteins and understand human disease.”
Dr Cheng’s work combines machine learning, manifold learning and large-language-model approaches for interpreting complex biological data, making UEF’s participation central to the data-analysis and algorithmic innovation of the project.
Transformative potential for personalised medicine
The RamanProSeq consortium aims to deliver a prototype sequencing platform that performs label-free, high-resolution identification of single proteins, opening new avenues for personalised medicine and real-time molecular diagnostics.
EIC announcement: EIC Pathfinder Open 2025 Results
