Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : Mari.Time (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : AWI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 25000.0 €

The correct timing of biological processes is crucial for organisms. The moon is an important timing cue for numerous marine species, ranging from brown and green algae to corals, worms and fishes. It acts either directly or via the synchronization of monthly (circalunar) inner clocks. Such lunar timing mechanisms typically control the gonadal maturation and behavioral changes associated with reproductive rhythms, including spectacular mass-spawning events. Despite their biological importance, the mechanisms underlying circalunar clocks, as well as their responses to naturalistic stimuli are unknown. My lab has spearheaded research into the mechanisms underlying circalunar timing systems, establishing tools and resources for two well-suited, complementary animal models: Platynereis dumerilii and Clunio marinus. We unraveled first principles of the circalunar clock, e.g. its continuous function in the absence of oscillation of the daily (circadian) clock. Recent unpublished work revealed the first gene that functionally impacts on circalunar rhythms. By capitalizing on these powerful tools and key findings, my lab is in a leading position to dissect the mechanisms of circalunar clocks and their interaction with other rhythms and the environment via three objectives: (1) A reverse genetic approach to unravel how nocturnal light sets the phase of the monthly clock. (2) A forward genetic screen to identify molecules involved in the circalunar clock, an experimental strategy that was the key to unravel the principles of animal circadian clocks. (3) By growing animals in outside tanks and subjecting them to established analyses, we will test our lab-based results in more naturalistic conditions. This project will substantially deepen our mechanistic insight into marine rhythms – ecologically important phenomena – and provide a first basis to predict how environmental changes might impact on timing systems of crucial importance to many marine species and likely beyond.

Mots-clés : chronobiology,photobiology
Projet ERC : ByoPiC (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe sciences
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2488350.0 €

The cosmological paradigm of structure formation is both extremely successful and plagued by many enigmas. Not only the nature of the main matter component, dark matter, shaping the structure skeleton in the form of a cosmic web, is mysterious; but also half of the ordinary matter (i.e. baryons) at late times of the cosmic history, remains unobserved, or hidden! ByoPiC focuses on this key and currently unresolved issue in astrophysics and cosmology: Where and how are half of the baryons hidden at late times? ByoPiC will answer that central question by detecting, mapping, and assessing the physical properties of hot ionised baryons at large cosmic scales and at late times. This will give a completely new picture of the cosmic web, added to its standard tracers, i.e. galaxies made of cold and dense baryons. To this end, ByoPiC will perform the first statistically consistent, joint analysis of complementary multiwavelength data: Planck observations tracing hot, ionised baryons via the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, optimally combined with optical and near infrared galaxy surveys as tracers of cold baryons. This joint analysis will rely on innovative statistical tools to recover all the (cross)information contained in these data in order to detect most of the hidden baryons in cosmic web elements such as (super)clusters and filaments. These newly detected elements will then be assembled to reconstruct the cosmic web as traced by both hot ionised baryons and galaxies. Thanks to that, ByoPiC will perform the most complete and detailed assessment of the census and contribution of hot ionised baryons to the total baryon budget, and identify the main physical processes driving their evolution in the cosmic web. Catalogues of new (super)clusters and filaments, and innovative tools, will be key deliverable products, allowing for an optimal preparation of future surveys.
Projet ERC : FONT (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Helmholtz Zentrum München — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HMGU
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The currently available neuroimaging tools, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and optical microscopy, are not adequate for deep tissue volumetric visualization of brain activity in real time. The need for such solutions underlies the large scale multi-year European Human Brain Project as well as the BRAIN initiative promoted by the US government. Under the currently funded ERC-StG project, we have pioneered the so-called five-dimensional optoacoustic imaging method that can simultaneously render spectrally and temporally resolved volumetric images deep from highly scattering tissues. Taking this achievement one step further, in this PoC grant we propose to prototype and validate a functional optoacoustic neuro-tomography (FONT) scanner specifically tailored for fully noninvasive volumetric observations of activity in whole brains of rodents. In combination with optoacoustics' well-established capacity for resolving vascular anatomy and multiple hemodynamic parameters deep in scattering tissues, this solution will open new vistas in the study of brain activity and development of novel therapies targeting neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders.

Mots-clés : functional neuroimaging,optoacoustic tomography,brain
Projet ERC : PHOENEEX (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Technical University of Denmark — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : DTU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2745500.0 €

The demand for compact energy systems for portable devices such as wearable sensors or mobile phones is increasing. Electrochemical systems are promising candidates for sustainable energy conversion and storage on miniaturised platforms. A recent approach to harvest green energy is biophotovoltaic systems (BPVs), where photosynthetic microorganisms are used to transform light into electrical energy. However, BPVs still provide a relatively low efficiency and are yet unable to deliver the high peak power required for sensor operation or wireless signal transmission in portable systems. In PHOENEEX, I will address these limitations by i) improving the efficiency of BPVs and ii) combining the BPVs with microsupercapacitors (µSCs) which can temporarily store the harvested electrical energy and provide a higher peak power output upon request. More specifically, I will develop highly optimised 3D carbon microelectrodes (3DCMEs) to enhance electron harvesting from cyanobacteria in BPVs and for increased energy density in µSCs. Finally, the improved BPVs and the optimised µSCs will be integrated on the BioCapacitor Microchip - a compact sustainable energy platform for portable systems. The fabrication of 3DCMEs with highly tailored material properties, large surface area and hierarchical architecture is achieved by pyrolysis of polymer templates in an inert atmosphere. The fundamental hypothesis of PHOENEEX is that the combination of novel precursor materials, new methods for 3D polymer microfabrication and optimised pyrolysis processes will allow for fabrication of 3DCMEs with highly tailored material properties, large surface area and hierarchical architecture impossible to obtain with any other method.
Projet ERC : COSMOS (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : University of Zurich — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UZH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 0.0 €

The desire to “freely suspend the constituents of matter” in order to study their behaviour can be traced back over 200 years to Lichtenberg’s diaries. From radio-frequency ion traps to optical tweezing of colloidal particles, existing methods to trap matter in free space or solution rely on the use of external fields that often strongly perturb the integrity of a macromolecule in solution. Recently, I invented the ‘electrostatic fluidic trap’, a “field-free” principle that supports stable, non-destructive confinement of single macromolecules in room temperature fluids, representing a paradigm shift in a nearly century-old field. The spatio-temporal dynamics of a single electrostatically trapped molecule reveals fundamental information on its properties, e.g., size and electrical charge. The charge of a macromolecule is in turn a strong function of its 3D conformation - the molecular basis of biological function. I now aim to develop a new platform to study 3D macromolecular structure and temporal conformation by measuring the electrical charge of a single trapped molecule in real time, using both optical microscopy and electrical detection. Beyond the conformational dynamics of a single molecule, we will also examine interactions between two or more molecules, and the detection of minute structural differences between closely related molecular isoforms. We will further develop a novel approach to electrical transport measurements on single molecules aimed at generating for the first time a catalog of ‘electrical signatures’ for biomolecules in solution. The ability to experimentally link electrical charge and molecular structure will not only open up a new physical dimension in our understanding of macromolecules, but also advance the development of ultrasensitive, high-throughput molecular sensors for biomedical detection and analytics, potentially enabling an optical or electrical “single-snapshot” read-out of the proteome or transcriptome of a single cell.

Mots-clés : single molecule trapping,nanoscale electrostatics,molecular electrometry
Projet ERC : RSVTriVax (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems Engineering
Entité participante : Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ETH Zurich
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The development of a Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) vaccine is deemed a global health priority by the World Health Organization. Globally, RSV causes 33 million episodes of infection and up to 120,000 deaths annually. The most affected populations are pre-term infants, young children and the elderly. Several decades of intensive research are yet to yield a clinically approved vaccine. This failure is mostly attributed to sophisticated viral mechanisms that prevent the induction of protective antibodies (Abs). Using cutting-edge molecular design tools, we developed a novel vaccine candidate (TriVax) to focus immune responses in such key neutralization epitopes. TriVax is a cocktail composed of three epitope-focused immunogens mimicking three distinct neutralization epitopes targeted by potent neutralizing Abs. Our primary target populations are pregnant women (protection of pre-term infants) and elderly, where the challenge is to boost subdominant, neutralizing Abs elicited during previous natural infections. Recently, we showed that epitope-focused immunogens are exquisite at boosting subdominant functional Abs, and in this scenario, superior to the strongest competitor vaccine candidates. In a preliminary study in Non-Human Primates, TriVax showed great promise by eliciting robust neutralization on an RSV naïve cohort, suggesting a good safety profile and the potential to emerge as a competitive alternative for vaccine development. For manufacturing, epitope-focused immunogens are simple and stable molecules that can be produced at low cost. Overall, we propose a viable vaccine formulation to protect against an important pathogen which carries large financial burdens on public health systems. Thus, our proposal has an important societal and financial impact, and will provide compelling evidence for Trivax to boost neutralizing Abs in a close-to-human animal model, thereby taking an essential step to consolidate the commercial potential of our vaccine.

Mots-clés : respiratory syncytial virus,vaccine design,rsv rational vaccine design,epitope  focused vaccines
Projet ERC : MiniEmbryoBlueprint (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Cellular, Developmental and Regenerative Biology
Entité participante : Pompeu Fabra University — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UPF
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2346803.21 €

The development of an embryo requires the spatially structured emergence of tissues and organs. This process relies on the early establishment of a coordinate system in the form of three orthogonal axes that act as a reference for laying down the body plan, a template for the organism. Genetic analysis of this process has revealed an underlying transcriptional blueprint that links the coordinate system and the body plan. However, the way in which the gene products contribute to the emergence of the body plan remains an open question. A reason for this is that this process involves feedbacks and integration between the activity of Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs) and the mechanics of multicellular ensembles, and that probing this relationship is experimentally challenging. In the case of mammalian embryos, which are particularly important as models for human development, our gaps in knowledge of these events are larger than in other organisms. This is partly due to the challenges associated with uterine development but also, and increasingly, because of the cost of mice and the difficulty of obtaining large numbers of embryos, as required for mechanistic experiments. In this project we shall use gastruloids, a novel and versatile Pluripotent Stem Cells based experimental system that we have developed for the study of mammalian development, to gain insights into the molecular and cellular basis underlying the emergence of the mammalian body plan. Gastruloids lack anterior neural structures and over a period of five days become organized in the fashion of a midgestation mouse embryo. We shall use the experimental versatility of the Gastruloid system to probe into the functional relationships between the mechanical activities of multicellular ensembles and the dynamics of GRNs that underlie the emergence of the mammalian body plan.

Mots-clés : systems developmental biology,image analysis
Projet ERC : NanoGut (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Université Catholique de Louvain — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1488937.5 €

The development of new oral drug delivery systems that will enable the absorption of therapeutic peptides to the systemic circulation is one of the greatest current challenges for the pharmaceutical industry and is the ‘holy grail’ of peptide delivery. Improved novel drug delivery systems are of utmost importance in order to fulfill the potential of this route of administration in the treatment of chronic diseases (e.g. type 2 diabetes mellitus), where daily injections are often required. There are various advantages of using nanocarriers for this purpose: they offer protection against chemical and enzymatic degradation, controlled release, targeting, tolerability and/or improved uptake and translocation resulting in enhanced bioavailability and greater therapeutic efficacy. I was the first to demonstrate that lipid-based nanocarriers trigger endogenous glucagon-like peptide (GLP)-1 and GLP-2 secretion in vivo after orally administered to mice. This effect can be exploited to develop a novel and unconventional drug delivery nanosystem as a promising strategy for the treatment of gastrointestinal disorders (e.g. type 2 diabetes mellitus, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis). There are significant gaps in current knowledge that need to be addressed to make this possible. I propose a series of studies to answer the following key questions: -First, can we develop a dual-action drug delivery nanosystem that synergizes its own biological effect and that of the encapsulated bioactive molecule? -Second, can we ameliorate type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) using an oral peptide-loaded dual-action lipid-based nanosystem? –Third, is this innovative strategy a viable alternative to current treatments in T2DM and IBD? By exploiting the gut pathophysiology, I propose an innovative therapeutic approach using cutting-edge advanced technologies to deal with an unmet therapeutical need in the treatment of gastrointestinal disorders.

Mots-clés : peptide oral delivery,drug delivery strategies
Projet ERC : COMMiT (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The development of precision and personalized medicine, notably in cancer, leads to an explosion in the cost of research, clinical trials, diagnosis and treatment. It calls for a change of paradigm in cell-based personalized models, allowing-high throughput screening of large panels of drugs at low cost and on minute samples. We invented in ERCadg CellO a new technology “Free-Flow Textile Chips” (FFTC) proving a solution to the above problem. It allows the production of high-resolution complex microfluidic devices at very low cost using the power of the textile industry. Using this technology we developed an automated platform able to generate, from a single micro-biopsy, a large number of 3D tumor cell spheroids encapsulated within individual nanoliter droplets, and to screen them against tens of drug combinations. This platform will reduce the time, sample size, cost of screening and drugs consumption per assay by factors ranging from 10 to 1000. This will in turn replace animal testing, and allow low-cost high-content drug screening and affordable precision medicine. This new platform will be tested versus conventional techniques in a real world context, and steps towards industrialization will be taken. We shall first target the market of research laboratories and drug development in the pharmaceutical industry, but also prepare clinical applications to the personalization of anticancer treatments. Beyond this, FFTC represents a major breakthrough in microfluidics, a technological field that is currently revolutionizing biology and medicine. Currently its democratization and societal impact are limited by fabrication costs. FFTC will overcome this barrier. COMMiT will thus pave the route to a wide range of other applications, such as “point-of-care” devices or “organs-on-chip” to replace animal testing.

Mots-clés : microfluidics,microfabrication,textiles technologies,polymers,high throughput screening,organoids,organs on chip,cancer,precision medicine,drug screening,3r rules
Projet ERC : GEMS (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of Hertfordshire — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 95401.25 €

The development of scientific models suffers from two related problems: ever-growing number of experimental results and scientists’ cognitive limitations (including cognitive biases). This multidisciplinary project (psychology, computer modelling, computer science and cognitive neuroscience) addresses these problems by developing a novel methodology for generating scientific models automatically. The methodology is general and can be applied to any science where experimental data are available. The method treats models as computer programs and evolves a population of models using genetic programming. The extent to which the models fit the empirical data is used as a fitness function. The best models–potentially modified by cross-over and mutation–are selected for the next generation. Pilot simulations have established the validity of the methodology with simple experiments. To demonstrate that the methodology is sound, can be used with complex datasets and can be generalised across sciences, four related strands of research are planned. First, ‘Building New Tools’ develops the methodology and creates techniques to understand and compare the evolved models. Second, ‘Explaining Human Data’ uses the methodology to explain a wide range of data on human cognition. This will be done in two steps: (a) data without learning (working memory and attention); and (b) data with learning (categorisation, implicit learning and explicit learning). Third, ‘Explaining Animal Data’ develops models to account for various aspects of animal behaviour, focusing on conditioning and categorisation. Finally, ‘Explaining Neuroscience Data’ extends the methodology to account for data combining information about cognitive and brain processes. This project explores virgin territory and thus opens up a new field of research. It combines insights from experimental psychology, cognitive modelling, cognitive neuroscience and computer science, disciplines in which the PI has strong track record.

Mots-clés : cognitive modelling,genetic programming,methodology,categorisation,implicit learning,explicit learning,animal cognition,cognitive neuroscience,scientific discovery