Double award for Can Aztekin: Rising Star Award and ERC Starting Grant
NRP 79 project leader Can Aztekin has been simultaneously presented with two prestigious awards for his pioneering research on limb regeneration.
Can Aztekin, Research Group Leader at the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory in Tübingen and leader of the NRP 79 research project “Studying limb development and regeneration using simplified systems”, has received two top-class awards: the 2025 International Society of Regenerative Biology Rising Star Award and a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC).
We extend our warm congratulations!
The Rising Star Award pays tribute to Aztekin’s innovative research on the question of how regenerative capacities are upheld across species boundaries and what influence environmental factors such as oxygen have on regeneration. With his ERC-funded project “Signal to Regeneration (SigReg)”, he is looking to find out how the dormant regenerative potential of mammals can be activated. The European Research Council is supporting the project with 1.8 million euros over five years.
Can Aztekin is currently leading a NRP 79-supported project on the cellular analysis of limb development and regeneration – a field of research that is presently still heavily dependent on animal experiments. The objective is to lead this research into a future that is less reliant on laboratory animals. To this end, Aztekin’s team is developing alternative models such as limb explants from frogs or mammalian stem-cell-based limb development models.
More about Aztekin’s research project: