Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : PHOTONCHIP (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : École polytechnique fédérale de Zurich — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ETH Zurich
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Single emitters in wide-bandgap semiconductors are key elements of future optical quantum technologies, including sensors, circuits, and fiber communication. The standard approach to detecting and characterizing single emitters is optical fluorescence microscopy, which requires a laboratory infrastructure due to the use of free-space optics. However, in order to integrate single emitters into functional devices and operate them in demanding environments, the optics must be compact, robust, and low maintenance. PHOTONCHIP addresses this issue by replacing the free-space optics with a single photonic integrated circuit (PIC).  In PHOTONCHIP, I will demonstrate a prototype PIC device that combines all optical functionality of single emitter detection – excitation and light collection at different wavelengths, lensed focusing, and fiber coupling – on a single chip. The PIC will shrink the size of the optics from meters to millimeters, reduce complexity and cost, and improve robustness with no need for optical re-alignment. Key technical innovations include broadband operation in the visible wavelength range, wavelength separation of excitation and fluorescent light, and integration of the microscope objective on chip.  The prototype PIC will be developed on single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center quantum emitters in diamond, providing the first commercial use case with existing applications in quantum sensors and communication networks. The PIC will simplify existing microscopy solutions, lead to lower system cost, extend use to cryogenic environments, and enable integration into portable sensors. More broadly, the chip will be developed as a generic platform for single emitter excitation, control and detection for optical and device metrology. Overall, the PIC has key potential for driving discovery and innovation in the critical EU technology areas of quantum and semiconductors.

Mots-clés : single emitters,quantum sensors,photonic integrated circuits
Projet ERC : BELFORT MATCH (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : KU Leuven — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The world has become one global village, strongly connected by the internet. Users, applications, and companies produce huge amounts of data. This data is mostly very private (health, financial, commercial data, etc.), requiring organizations to encrypt the data when storing or transmitting it. In Europe, fortunately, our GDPR regulations are very strict about this. On the other hand, many legitimate applications want to inspect or match the data with some database. Examples are matching encrypted names with a red list, providing privacy in financial transactions, or matching encrypted DNA snippets in a database. A solution to these conflicting requirements is offered by a new field in cryptography: computing on encrypted data (COED), and more specifically, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). With FHE, data sits encrypted in the cloud. The data holder, i.e. the remote server, has no knowledge and is unable to decrypt the data. The magic of FHE is that operations can still be performed on the data, even though it remains encrypted. Unfortunately, it is currently too slow and too cumbersome to be used in practice. Within our ERC grant BELFORT, which focuses on "Hardware Acceleration for Computing on Encrypted Data", a novel hardware processor demonstrates orders of magnitude speed-up for essential operations in FHE. This POC aims to move from our academic proof of concept into a full-stack project integrated into open-source and commercial FHE libraries. We then plan to run a demo on an application of database look-up operations (‘keyword matching’), as they appear in many FHE applications. The ultimate goal of this project is to make operations on encrypted data efficient enough to perform them on the fly in a cloud setting. When a user formulates privacy-preserving encrypted queries to a server, it should be imperceptible that the operations are occurring in the encrypted domain. Being able to answer a query on the fly without delay will make this goal happen.
Projet ERC : PORECAPTURE (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Valence — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The continued growth in emissions of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is a pressing issue for our society. The urgent need for strategies to reduce greenhouses gas concentrations has aroused international action from governments. Carbon capture and storage technologies (CCS) have been considered a key solution to reverse the current CO2 trend because they can mitigate, or at least delay, the alarming greenhouses effects. However, the most effective solution for post-combustion CO2 remains still the chemisorption in aqueous solutions of alkanolamines despite limitations as low selectivity, corrosiveness and high energy requirement for operation and maintenance. Membranes are arguably an attractive technology for CO2 removal from mixed, humid gases as it is a relatively simple technology, that can be easily replaced and requires minimum investment and operation costs. In this regard, mixed-matrix membranes incorporating Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) as crystalline components are an excellent alternative to overcome two of the major limitations of polymer-based membranes: swelling and low selectivity towards CO2. Among the families of titanium-organic frameworks developed in the ERC Stg grant Chem-fs-MOF (714122), one of our patented materials (MUV-10) represents a significant improvement or meets the specifications of benchmark materials in terms of key properties relevant to CO2 capture in wet conditions as: gravimetric uptake, adsorbate selectivity, energy efficient sorbent regeneration and recyclability in humid environments. With PORECAPTURE we intend now to explore the commercial potential of this material across three main goals that will include: 1. Optimizing its production at multi-gram scale, 2. Fabricating a new generation of membranes for energy efficient CO2 capture that will be tested in operational environments, and 3. Defining an optimal business model strategy that will include validating our know-how with licensors of CCS technologies.
Projet ERC : TurboEEG (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : École polytechnique de Turin — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Electroencephalography (EEG) from scalp potentials is a crucial non-invasive technique for imaging the electric brain activity. EEG is of primary importance in several scenarios of substantial societal impact ranging from electric characterization of epileptic seizures to the development of brain computer interfaces. One of the key technologies in advanced EEG imaging is the source imaging/localization procedure where the volume electric current responsible for the scalp potential is obtained solving an inverse source problem, in turn requiring several solutions of the EEG forward problem. The imaging of the brain currents is what makes the standard EEG readings into high resolution EEG brain imaging. Lamentably, the standard EEG forward problem has cubical computational complexity resulting in an eight times increase in computer memory and computational time every time the problem doubles in size. This substantially limits the impact of EEG imaging, especially in low power computational systems and in social settings that cannot afford expensive computing machines. The object of the “TurboEEG” project is to radically change this paradigm, we will translate the outcomes of the ERC Consolidator Grant project “321” into the field of EEG neuroimaging obtaining and distributing the first existing EEG open source package that will solve the EEG imaging problem in linear complexity, speeding up standard EEG imaging of orders of magnitude and making high resolution EEGs widely available and cheap. Since EEG source imaging is what translate a standard EEG device into an high resolution one, the new open source tool will have a substantial impact on society by making available high resolution EEG technology in environments where top computational power is not available, such as small hospitals, ambulatories, schools and universities. The new open-source tool will in fact also have a substantial impact on education, professional training, and brain research.
Projet ERC : MYTI (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : École supérieure Sainte-Anne de Pise — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

MYTI - MYokinetic Towards Innovation, aims at boosting the clinical translation of the technology developed within the ERC funded project MYKI - A Bidirectional MyoKinetic Implanted Interface for Natural Control of Artificial Limbs. Core of the project is an innovative human-machine-interface for the control of upper-limb prostheses, which relies on a multitude of permanent magnets implanted within the residual muscles. Briefly, external electronic components acquire the magnetic field of the magnets, retrieve their displacement resulting from muscle contraction, and subsequently decode the user’s intention to control multiple degrees of freedom of the prosthesis in a natural and intuitive way. The MYKI project led to the successful first-in-human clinical demonstration of the interface: one participant received the short-term (six-week) implantation of multiple magnets and was fitted with a self-contained myokinetic prosthesis. In just six weeks, the participant achieved performance comparable to those achieved with standard-of-care solutions. Building on the know-how acquired within MYKI, MYTI will address the weaknesses uncovered by past research, and push forward the advancement of the solution for its adoption into standard-of-care settings. Practically, it will address the open challenges related to the long-term usability of the interface, to enable extensive long-term clinical trials necessary to validate the technology, while laying the foreground for its future commercialization. The translation from research towards innovation will be achieved through three main objectives: (i) the identification of a magnet coating material suitable for chronic applications; (ii) the effective insertion of the magnets inside the muscles, through the development of a dedicated surgical injector to be used under ultrasound guidance; (iii) the conduction of an in-depth market research and the definition of an IPR strategy aimed at the future technology commercialization.
Projet ERC : foodRNA (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Stockholm — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The field of food quality control is important to all consumers - ensuring food safety and detecting food substitutions and fraud. Next-generation sequencing has the potential to revolutionize the field, but practical solutions are lagging behind. State-of-the-art DNA-based tests yield limited information beyond what animal, plant and bacterial species constitute a given food product - and in some cases performing that task sub-optimally. Profiling RNA in food products can potentially yield important novel information that DNA-based tests cannot - including expression information that can be used to ensure food safety and quality and detect food fraud. With a focus on plant-based food products, we will develop, optimize and set up tests that will be substantially cheaper and more sensitive than the state-of-the-art, allowing upscaling in food quality control. We will provide our product as a service to national food control agencies (which we already collaborate with) and also to high-end food producers as an accreditation service. We foresee that as consumer awareness increases, the demand for these tests will increase exponentially in the future.
Projet ERC : AziFlu (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Leyde — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Influenza neuraminidases are the primary target for anti-influenza small molecule drugs and are retaining glycosidases that form a transient covalent intermediate during substrate hydrolysis. Oseltamivir (Tamiflu) and Zanamivir (Relenza), the two small-molecule anti-influenza drugs used primarily for early onset treatment of flu infections, inhibit influenza neuraminidases competitively (and thus reversibly). The AziFlu ERC PoC proposal is rooted in our finding that N-acyl Oseltamivir aziridines, or Aziflus, inhibit influenza neuraminidase covalently. They block viral outgrowth in an infected cell model. Our compounds are at least as potent as Oseltamivir. Rather than temporarily disabling influenza neuraminidases, our technology acts in an irreversible, permanent, manner. Our drug candidates are selective for influenza neuraminidases over human neuraminidases, and we propose they may be more effective than existing drugs and may also find use as prophylactics and to treat later disease stages. The AziFlu program will develop our mechanism-based influenza neuraminidase inhibition technology and take the first steps to create a start-up company for bringing the technology to market. To strengthen our scientific case (experimental development, A), we will (A-I) optimise our leads by the synthesis and biochemical evaluation of comprehensive sets of focused analogues; (A-II) design a synthetic route to prepare gram-scale quantities of selected leads; and (A-III) develop assays for in vitro and in vivo target inhibition efficacy, target engagement, and viral outgrowth studies. To prepare for the establishment of a spin-out biotech company (business development, B) to take our leads towards the clinic we will (B-IV) strengthen our intellectual property (IP) position; (B-V) analyse the anti-influenza drug market; and (B-VI) create a start-up biotech company to which the IP will be transferred.
Projet ERC : BIoRead (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université d'Hambourg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The aim of this project is to use an ultra-fast, high throughput method for analysing DNA single molecules for liquid biopsy and other biomedical applications. The proposed methodology, “Laser-Assisted DNA Optical Mapping (LADOM)”, allows retrieving the barcode of single molecules of DNA in real time, as they flow through a nanochannel in a fluidic device. It combines a cheap device fabrication, flexible DNA labelling (customizable for different applications), microscope- and camera-free set up, a read-out sensitive to single molecules, very high throughput (tens of molecules per minute), ability to detect very small fragments, and no limitation for the maximum molecule’s length, what is especially interesting for applications dealing with ultra-long intact, genomic DNA. In this project, we request funding to offer a service to analyze samples from possible stakeholders from the biomedical sector, and to standardize the technology and improve the troughput bThe aim of this project is to use an ultra-fast, high throughput method for analysing DNA single molecules for liquid biopsy and other biomedical applications. The proposed methodology, “Laser-Assisted DNA Optical Mapping (LADOM)”, allows retrieving the barcode of single molecules of DNA in real time, as they flow through a nanochannel in a fluidic device. It combines a cheap device fabrication, flexible DNA labelling (customizable for different applications), microscope- and camera-free set up, a read-out sensitive to single molecules, very high throughput (tens of molecules per minute), ability to detect very small fragments, and no limitation for the maximum molecule’s length, what is especially interesting for applications dealing with ultra-long intact, genomic DNA. In this project, we request funding to offer a service to analyze samples from possible stakeholders from the biomedical sector, and to standardize the technology and improve the troughput by developing a software to automate the data analysis.
Projet ERC : MABank (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Istituti di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : IRCCS
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 115000.0 €

Stem cells led to effective cures for diseases of blood and epithelia. However, in the case of diseases affecting muscles, connective tissue or brain, significant challenges persist for expansion of a sufficient number of corrected cells, delivery and engraftment. Even when these problems will be solved the prospective per-patient cost of the treatment (up to 2M$) will make such therapies unsustainable for NHS. We developed protocols of cell therapy using mesoangioblasts (Mabs), vessel associated progenitors that, despite promising results in animal models, showed modest efficacy in patients. To address this, we transplanted autologous dystrophic Mabs expressing a small nuclear RNA engineered to skip dystrophin exon 51, that enters and corrects also neighboring nuclei of the multinucleated muscle fiber, thus bringing dystrophic production to therapeutic levels. A Phase I/IIa trial is currently running. Even in case of success, the cost would remain prohibitive. Through the ongoing ERC ADG 884952-UniMab, we are completing the development of immortal, immune-privileged Mabs from dystrophic patients thanks to genome editing of HLA and the expression of tolerogenic proteins. In this PoC project we will produce universal Mabs from healthy donors and will study the feasibility of producing and storing a large amount of universal Mabs through a bank of universal donor Mabs from healthy patients, ready to be corrected for the specific genetic mutation and injected into the patient following the motto “one serve many”. Available cells, a GMP-grade lentivector, expressing the wt cDNA of the mutated gene and a mouse model for pre-clinical tests would be sufficient to start a trial even for extremely rare diseases that currently lack even the hope of a therapy. This work will enable the business exploitation of the MABANK technology, by creating a company with a GMP biobank that may operate internally and make cells available to clinicians and Biotech companies.
Projet ERC : WAVESIM (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Twente — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Maxwell solvers are widely used in science and industry for the design and analysis of photonic devices, radio frequency electronics, integrated circuits, antennas, metamaterials, and more. Unfortunately, solving Max-well’s equations for complex structures is extremely computationally intensive.  In the ERC funded research project DEEP VISION, we discovered a new approach to solve Maxwell's equations much faster (a factor 2000) and more accurate (a factor 10 at least) than conventional methods. In this proof of concept project, we will perform the necessary research and development to come from these promising results to a minimum viable product that can be used by academia and industry. We gather a group of early adopters, implement feedback from these users, and investigate different revenue models for the software, all in preparation of commercializing the software.
Projet ERC : NeutrAD (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Vérone — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

With the NeutrAD ERC PoC project, we present the first disease-modifying Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) drugs that abrogate leukocyte-mediated neurotoxicity and represent a novel class of drugs in the treatment of AD.  AD is a neurological disorder characterized by progressive deterioration of cognitive function and leads to death within 3-9 years after diagnosis. AD is highly prevalent in elderly, and it is estimated that 35M patients suffer from the disease worldwide. As a result, AD has tremendous social and economic impact. This is aggravated by the lack of disease-modifying drugs, as current therapies only provide short-term symptomatic benefit. Hence, novel therapeutic approaches are of critical importance to resolve this urgent and growing health crisis. Our novel anti-AD drug candidates use a neutrophil-targeted approach and unlock a novel avenue for the millions that suffer from AD. Growing evidence supports the role of inflammation in the development of neurodegeneration in AD. For example, our previous research has demonstrated a role for neutrophils in the induction of memory decline and neuropathological hallmarks of AD. Furthermore, our data shows that a highly activated and degranulating neutrophil phenotype induces neurotoxicity in an in vitro AD context. Preliminary results have also demonstrated that our novel drug candidates rescue neuronal death and have disease-modifying potential in AD-like mouse models.  In NeutrAD, we will explore the technical and commercial potential of our drug candidates as the first disease-modifying drugs against AD. Specifically, we will optimise and subsequently test the technical feasibility of our two drug candidates in AD-like in vitro and in vivo models. In parallel, we will explore the commercial opportunity of our novel AD drugs and analyse the IP position and strategy, as well as the market and (existing and emerging) competitors. Finally, we will consolidate the project outcomes in an investor-ready business plan.