Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : HOLOCELL (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Cell cultures are essential for biomedical research and drug screening. The environment and the arrangement directly affect cell function. It has become clear that biological cells behave differently when cultured on a surface as opposed to a 3D environment. This discrepancy between 2D in vitro studies and the 3D environment found in vivo is critical for cancer research, most notably patient-specific therapy and high-throughput drug screening and discovery. Almost 90% of all drug candidates fail during the trial phases and one of the main reasons identified is the low physiological relevance of 2D cell cultures. Technologies are needed that enable the fast and efficient culturing of 3D cell assemblies with high repeatability and control over size and morphology. Here, we use our recently developed technology and fabrication know-how together with the expertise from our ERC-funded research to realize the first 3D bioassembler where the shape of the cell aggregates can be precisely defined by the user. Within this ERC-POC grant we plan to develop a fully operational, stand-alone benchtop bioassembler that instantly aggregates biological cells, spheroids, particles or hydrogel capsules into fully defined 3D structures using acoustic holography. Our device will be an easy-to-use and affordable instrument that is fully compatible with established biological procedures and laboratory equipment and which allows scientists to culture the specific cell structures they need. The grant will allow us to protect our know-how, identify further markets, and develop a commercialization strategy for our technology. Overall, this project will generate the first 3D cell assembler that permits the generation of user-defined cell spheroids and custom shapes at a press of button and thus presents an innovation with a sizeable market potential.
Projet ERC : COFUTURESLITERACY (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

People around the world imagine futures differently. These imaginations of the future are most clearly found in the fictions they produce (Future Fictions or Speculative Fiction; SF). SF acts as a repository of ideas related to societal change, technological change, climate change, and other kinds of change. How do we take these different imaginations, and use them to drive societal innovations? How do we work with the complexity of visions around the world, not merely in its richer parts but in its poorer, or developing parts, to think new kinds of futures: economic, cultural, political? And how do we scale and translate these visions for use in policy and policy-adjacent contexts, how can they inspire new social and technological developments? While the need for these fictions to drive innovation is by now well-known at research and policy level, the core problem is that there have been no methodologies, no tools, and no frameworks that acknowledge the deep complexity of global, creative imaginaries of the future and feed them directly into new ways of thinking about societal challenges. In the PoC-CoFutures Literacy, we will take people’s imaginations of the future, especially as found in SF, and systematize the methods used by creative professionals globally to imagine futures. These creative methods will be combined with methods used in innovations, scenario and policy work to understand, anticipate and generate futures. Together, this will form the knowledge solution we term CoFutures Literacy. The PoC will develop this knowledge solution by taking some of the central ideas from diverse imaginations of the future worldwide from SF research done by the ERC-STG CoFUTURES (2020-2024), combine these with existing models of futures and innovation research, and crystallize these functions into three modules of the knowledge solution: a) a comparative methodological toolkit, b) a research and design handbook, and, c) an open media and lecture library.
Projet ERC : Regenerative ICOs (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Worldbrain ug (haftungsbeschrankt) — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : WORLDBRAIN
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 108075.0 €

The economic incentive structures of an organisation strongly influences their governance models & power distribution, sometimes to the extent that attempts at decentralising governance fail, if they are built on centralising economic incentives. Traditional forms of equity investing offer uncapped returns to shareholders that create strong incentives for profit maximisation and centralisation of power. Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) on the blockchain were designed to allow organisations to raise funding from their community and bring a greater distribution of economic gains and governance power to organisations’ stakeholders. However, since tokens issued through ICOs are also offering uncapped returns, current blockchain networks have become even more centralised. There are investor reward models in traditional forms of investing that cap stakeholder profits and through that remove the incentives for profit maximisation, like (Platform) Cooperatives and Steward Ownership companies. They have shown to bring greater distribution of economic gains and governance power. However those organisations struggle to raise (early stage) funding in the traditional financial market a Consumer investors conscious about the damaging effects of investing in uncapped public equity have challenges investing in such organisations. This is because capped investor profit models have only been implemented in the existing legal systems with significant bureaucratic hurdles, similar to traditional startup investing up until the advent of ICOs in the late 2010s.  This proof-of-concept helps organisations to run Initial Coin Offerings with capped investor profit models so they can raise funding from a diverse set of supporters, while avoiding mission drift and profit maximisation incentives. It enables more economic decentralisation, transparency and accountability, from which decentralised organisational governance can be developed and maintained in a more sustainable way.
Projet ERC : ADSOILS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Tecnalia — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 95200.0 €

AdSoils project aims to evaluate, validate, and develop artificial advanced soil technology for its commercial exploitation as a tool for screening crops from belowground. As part of the Farm to Fork strategy, the European Commission aims at reduced “nutrient losses of at least 50% by 2030, while ensuring no deterioration in soil fertility. This is expected to lead to a reduction in fertiliser use of at least 20%”. The breeding and agrochemical sectors are now seeking ways for crops to acquire water and nutrient more efficiently, supplying seeds, compounds and inoculum that reduce soil contamination and make crops more resilient to climate change. Assessing the effectiveness of such strategies is a major bottleneck because current screening technologies are destructive costly and time consuming. Within the ERC consolidator grant 647857 “SENSOILs”, an artificial soil that becomes transparent during watering has been successfully developed. This technology, suited for small scale laboratory research, has shown great potential, enabling the discovery of new forms of mobility by soil bacteria and mapping root induced chemical gradients at microscale resolution. Adsoils project proposes to move a step further and to demonstrate that the AdSoils solution can be fabricated and applied in commercial screens for the discovery of agrochemicals and genomic regions involved in water and nutrient use efficiency. The project will identify cost-effective fabrication routes enabling a close mimic of natural soils and will produce a sufficient volume to validate the soil prototype with industrial end-users.
Projet ERC : MultiSeq (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université polytechnique de Catalogne — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 80000.0 €

Recent advances in Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) of nucleic acids (i.e. DNA or RNA) have transformed biology and medicine. Today NGS is one of the main pillars of research in various biological disciplines, and it has already pervaded numerous fields of applications ranging from clinics to the biotechnological industry. Given its versatility and high demand, the global market for NGS is rapidly expanding, with the number of sequenced samples doubling every two years. However, while major advances in NGS were mainly related to a rapid increase in sequencing throughput per machine, the preparation of sequencing libraries - the other integral step of NGS, has largely remained unchanged. Currently, this step is the major financial and operational bottleneck for sequencing projects, limiting the widespread adoption and utility of NGS. Current state-of-the-art solutions for overcoming these problems either require high upfront costs and/or are laborious. We are developing a bioinformatics solution to these problems, which minimizes the cost and time of library preparation. Our approach, called MultiSeq, allows designing a multiplexing strategy to reduce the number of libraries followed by computational demultiplexing. We plan to extend the experimental proof of concept of our method by applying it to broadly sequenced species. In addition, we will integrate our algorithms into a versatile computing framework and develop a pilot project in an industrially relevant context. In parallel, we will perform market analysis and evaluate the most suitable IP protection and commercialization strategies of our technology. If successful, MultiSeq will be a game-changing approach that will impact sequencing technology and related industries by further democratizing the field of NGS and benefiting both the scientific community and society.
Projet ERC : R4R (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université technique de Prague — Pays : Rép. Tchèque — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Unevaluated science is not worth funding. Gone are the days where a scientific breakthrough could be based on scribbles made on a few loose sheets of paper reviewed by a single attentive reader. Most disciplines rely on experimental data that is collected, analyzed, and presented using powerful computational tools. The scientific adventure hinges on our ability to openly and widely share and reproduce such results. The goal of this PoC is to market a tool, R4R, for non-programmer scientists to make their archival work easily reproducible and offer it to them through a non-expensive licence. Affordable reproducibility is key to independent evaluation of previously published results.  We will focus on reproducibility of data analysis pipelines written in R with RMarkdown or Jupyter. Creating a reproducible environment is hard, labor-intensive and error-prone, and requires expertise that data analysts lack. We propose to use dynamic program analysis techniques to track dependencies, data inputs, and other sources of non-determinism needed for reproducibility. R4R will synthesize metadata to generate self-contained, portable, fully reproducible environments, based on Docker images.
Projet ERC : SPRINT (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 €

Perovskite-silicon tandem solar cells are one of the most promising new technologies in solar energy research, due to their high efficiencies and use of low-cost materials. One attractive way to make these tandems is to grow the wide band gap perovskite on textured silicon solar cells, forming a monolithic tandem. Record efficiencies of 31.25% have been reported for these monolithic tandems, but still on relatively small area devices (1 cm2). To bring this technology closer to the market, it is imperative to start focussing on scalability. Specifically, the perovskite top cell needs to be reliably produced with industrially-validated, scalable deposition methods. This deposition method should also allow high deposition rates and direct integration of the perovskite top cell into textured silicon cells. SPRINT will develop sputtering deposition of these perovskites. Sputtering is a highly industrialized physical vapor deposition (PVD) method that tackles all challenges: high deposition rate, conformal deposition and is scalable. But to date it hasn’t been explored for halide perovskites. SPRINT's goal is to use the knowledge generated in my ERC StG CREATE for halide target fabrication (patent filed) and single target PVD deposition, and apply this to develop a sputtering coating process for inorganic wide band gap perovskites for monolithic integration in tandem devices. SPRINT will bring an innovative solution to key stakeholders in the PV market. Specifically, PV module manufacturers (such as Oxford PV and Meyer Burger) could implement the process into existing sputtering systems in their R&D labs and later into production lines. Vacuum equipment manufacturers (such as Von Ardenne and Demcon TSST) will benefit from the demand for deposition equipment. This will allow fast-tracking a new generation of PV to the market with > 30% efficiency at a lower price point, strengthening the European PV market.
Projet ERC : PRIME (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : University Hospital Aachen — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UKA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Immunotherapy holds great promise for curative cancer treatment. While immune checkpoint inhibitors can induce complete and long-term cures, the percentage of patients responding to immunotherapy remains to be low. Combining immunotherapy with chemotherapeutic drugs that induce immunogenic cell death (ICD) is among the most promising strategies to potentiate antitumor immune responses. Chemotherapeutics are clinically typically administered via intravenous infusion, once every couple of weeks, at high doses. Metronomic dosing is based on the application of chemotherapy drugs at high frequency and low doses, and it is gaining increasing interest to potentiate chemo-immunotherapy responses. However, high-frequency low-dose chemotherapy administration in the clinic via intravenous infusion is pragmatically undoable and economically not feasible. At-home administration via oral ingestion or subcutaneous self-injection is impossible, because of the side effect spectrum of chemotherapeutic drugs. In the PRIME project, we aim to establish PRodrug technology for Immunotherapy-priming via patient-friendly at-home MEtronomic dosing. Prodrugs have assisted in improving drug performance for over a century now, and they are widely employed in pharmaceutical industry and clinical practice, with approximately 10% of new drug approvals technically being prodrugs. We will set out to establish a synthetic and formulation strategy to produce a novel immunogenic prodrug platform, and upon subcutaneous metronomic dosing, we will evaluate the preclinical performance of our prodrugs as monotherapy and in combination with immunotherapy in breast and prostate cancer mouse models. We anticipate that exploiting the technological and socio-economic potential of PRIME will unlock new avenues towards at-home cancer treatment opportunities with enhanced therapeutic outcomes and improved patient quality-of-life.
Projet ERC : Open-SESAME (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : University Hospital Aachen — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UKA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

OPEN-SESAME will assess the technical and commercial feasibility of a modular microbubble platform technology to enhance the delivery of drugs across biological barriers. The project aims to: (i) establish a robust and scalable synthesis protocol for producing shell- and shape-optimized polymeric microbubbles; (ii) evaluate the preclinical performance of our ultrasound-responsive microbubble enhancers in brain and tumor mouse models; (iii) strengthen our intellectual property (IP) position through freedom-to-operate investigation and generation of new IP on microbubble functionalization; (iv) consult key opinion leaders and perform market analysis of the drug therapy enhancer landscape; and (v) consolidate results in an investor-ready business plan to guide the commercialization of our microbubble platform. We anticipate that by exploiting the technological and socio-economic potential identified in the OPEN-SESAME project, we will create completely new opportunities for the use of microbubbles plus ultrasound to enhance drug delivery and improve therapy outcomes in patients suffering from high-medical-need diseases.
Projet ERC : OnePub (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université Paris-Saclay — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Book publishing involves many stakeholders and a complex set of inflexible tools and formats. Current workflows are inefficient because authors and editors cannot make changes directly to the content once it has been laid out. They are costly because creating different output formats, such as PDF, ePub or HTML requires manual labor. Finally, new requirements such as the European directive on accessibility incur additional costs and delays. The goal of the OnePub POC project is to demonstrate the feasibility and value of a book production workflow based on a set of collaborative editing tools and a single document source representing the “ground truth” of the book content and layout. The editing tools will be tailored to the needs of each stakeholder, e.g. author, editor or typesetter, and will feature innovative interaction techniques from the PI’s ERC project ONE.  The project will focus on textbooks and academic publications as its testbed because they feature some of the most stringent constraints in terms of content types and content layout. They also run on tight deadlines, emphasizing the need for an efficient process.  OnePub will define a unified format for the document source, create several collaborative document editors, and develop an open and extensible architecture so that new editors and add-ons can be added to the workflow. Together, these developments will set the stage for a new ecosystem for the publishing industry, with a level-playing field where software companies can provide components while publishers and their service contractors can decide which components to use for their workflows.
Projet ERC : SpikeZip (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Imec the Netherlands — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 144000.0 €

In-vivo neural recording and transmission of a vast number of neurons is essential in comprehending the brain and nervous system. However, the core challenge in the field of high-channel-count in-vivo neural recording is the limitation in transferring data posed by the bandwidth and energy consumption, which currently lacks a viable telemetry solution to effectively address this challenge. This PoC project introduces a novel retinomorphic encoding method, SpikeZip, which offers several advantages over existing approaches for processing neural data, such as low information loss, minimal latency, and reduced hardware overhead. The technical advances demonstrated in this project will have significant impacts on various applications areas, such as neuroscience research with free-moving small animals, low-latency closed-loop neuromodulation, implantable brain-computer interfaces, and cognitive prosthetics. The proposed method has the potential to revolutionize the way we record and process neural data, enabling us to better understand the brain's cognitive functions and develop new therapies for various neurological disorders. This PoC project will develop a robust demonstration system and rigorously validate it in small animal studies, with settings that can be effectively applied and translated across a diverse range of neuroscience and neurotherapeutic applications. SpikeZip will develop a go-to-market strategy that highlights the technology's unique features and benefits, with a focus on IP and licensing opportunities, and engaging with industry partners to identify promising commercialization opportunities.

Mots-clés : brain computer interfaces,neural interfaces,neural data processing,compression,neural decoding,low latency,event based
Projet ERC : PHOTOCURE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Aetherphlox ab — Pays : Suède — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 100000.0 €

Antibiotic-resistant bacterial skin and soft tissue infections (SSTIs) are difficult to diagnose and treat, prolonging hospital stays and lowering quality of life. Chronic wounds harbour antibiotic-resistant microorganisms that form biofilms, leading to conditions like diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs). Approximately 50% of DFUs become infected, making them the most prevalent and costly diabetes complication, with a higher mortality and morbidity risk from lower limb amputation. There is an urgent need to develop effective, localised solutions for treating SSTIs that do not depend on antibiotics, especially against complex biofilms like those occurring in DFU cases.  In this Proof of Concept project, we will evaluate a PHOTOCURE wound patch: a porous nanothin Ag/TiOx film with visible-light photocatalytic activity that produces superoxide radicals to effectively eradicate biofilms in the SSTIs context. The patch boasts enhanced mechanical stability for durability and sustained activity across multiple irradiation cycles, offering a viable option for recurrent treatment. PHOTOCURE patch presents a more efficient drug-free alternative to conventional antibiotic treatments, with reduced adverse effects, addressing the escalating challenges of antibiotic and multidrug resistance.  The project will validate the antimicrobial efficacy of TiOx-polymer nanocomposite patches against both single and multiple-species biofilms relevant to chronic SSTIs, notably DFUs, using ex vivo and in vivo human-relevant models. Subsequently, we will devise a comprehensive IP strategy, secure initial patents, and conduct thorough market and competitor analyses within the antimicrobial wound care dressing sector. Finally, we will outline a detailed business case for advancing the PHOTOCURE prototype to market.

Mots-clés : antimicrobial resistance,wound dressings