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: Xavier Trepat at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia in Barcelona, Nikta Fakhri at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and Erwin Frey at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich .
"I am very excited to start a new collaboration with world-leading researchers of this consortium, both on the theory and experimental sides" , says Trepat. "The topic of information flows in non-equilibrium systems is a great challenge for physicists and biologists, and I am quite convinced that this grant will allow us to develop a general framework to understand this problem".
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," says Doostmohammadi. "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.
At IBEC, the group of Integrative cell and tissue dynamics , led by ICREA Research Professor Xavier Trepat, will play a central role in developing the experimental platforms that make information flows directly measurable in multicellular systems. Building on its internationally recognised expertise in mechanobiology, the group will combine force mapping, optogenetic perturbations and advanced 3D tissue engineering approaches to study how information is transmitted through organoids, embryoids and engineered tissues. By generating large-scale, high-quality datasets that integrate mechanical and biochemical signals, the team will work closely with the consortium’s theorists to test new frameworks for understanding tissue organisation, cancer invasion and regeneration.
"Addressing the problem of information flows in multicellular systems will help us understand processes in development, regeneration and disease", says Trepat.
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 project’s launch will take place in April 2027 at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.