Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : InCanTeSiMo (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems Engineering
Entité participante : University of Freiburg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

With InCanTeSiMo I aim to realize local delivery and activation of cancer-defeating synthetic circuits. Despite the advent of immunotherapy as promising treatment against a number of cancers, surgery, radio- or chemotherapy, alone or in combination, remain the most common interventions. While surgery and radiotherapy are mainly targeted to the cancer itself, chemotherapy has a systemic mode of action, affecting both healthy as well as diseased cells. An innovative way to fight cancer would be the use of synthetic circuits sensing the status of the cell into which they are delivered and acting only in response to a detected diseased status. This type of cancer therapy lends itself well to personalization, as each patient’s specific profile could be considered when designing the synthetic circuits. Since naked plasmid DNA cannot be simply released in the blood, the synthetic circuits must be encapsulated into protective vehicles, which should shield them from the immune system and accumulate them at the site of cancer. Moreover, to limit side effects due to the potential accumulation of the delivery vehicles in other body parts, it would be advantageous to locally activate the synthetic circuits with an external trigger, such as light. This would additionally allow activating the therapy at specific time points. This project comprises three major engineering efforts: 1) the establishment of cost-effective production of delivery vehicles able to specifically invade cancer cells; 2) the realization of new synthetic circuits functioning at the protein level that discern between healthy and cancer cells based on the amount of a metabolite and trigger apoptosis, or convert a pro-drug into the active drug, in the latter ones only; 3) the development of a novel red light-inducible protein-protein interaction tool.

Mots-clés : delivery vehicles,optogenetics
Projet ERC : eNANO (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : Institute of Photonic Sciences — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ICFO;ICFO-CERCA
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1899788.0 €

With eNANO I will introduce a disruptive approach toward controlling and understanding the dynamical response of material nanostructures, expanding nanoscience and nanotechnology in unprecedented directions. Specifically, I intend to inaugurate the field of free-electron nanoelectronics, whereby electrons evolving in the vacuum regions defined by nanostructures will be generated, guided, and sampled at the nanoscale, thus acting as probes to excite, detect, image, and spectrally resolve polaritonic modes (e.g., plasmons, optical phonons, and excitons) with atomic precision over sub-femtosecond timescales. I will exploit the wave nature of electrons, extending the principles of nanophotonics from photons to electrons, therefore gaining in spatial resolution (by relying on the large reduction in wavelength) and strength of interaction (mediated by Coulomb fields, which in contrast to photons render nonlinear interactions ubiquitous when using free electrons). I will develop the theoretical and computational tools required to investigate this unexplored scenario, covering a wide range of free-electron energies, their elastic interactions with the material atomic structures, and their inelastic coupling to nanoscale dynamical excitations. Equipped with these techniques, I will further address four challenges of major scientific interest: (i) the fundamental limits to the space, time, and energy resolutions achievable with free electrons; (ii) the foundations and feasibility of pump-probe spectral microscopy at the single-electron level; (iii) the exploration of quantum-optics phenomena by means of free electrons; and (iv) the unique perspectives and potential offered by vertically confined free-electrons in 2D crystals. I will face these research frontiers by combining knowledge from different areas through a multidisciplinary theory group, in close collaboration with leading experimentalists, pursuing a radically new approach to study and control the nanoworld.

Mots-clés : free electrons,electron microscope spectroscopies,molecular plasmons,sensing,atomic scale optical excitations,photon free polaritonics,quantum fluctuation phenomena
Projet ERC : Host-TB (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative Biology: from Genes and Genomes to Systems
Entité participante : University of Cambridge — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : U. Cambridge
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1366940.49 €

With more than 10 million cases annually, tuberculosis (TB) remains a global health problem. TB epidemic is exacerbated by the spread of multidrug-resistant TB. Host-directed therapies (HDTs) can improve immune mechanisms by augmenting the ability of host cells to kill M. tuberculosis (Mtb) or by modulating the immune response to prevent excessive inflammation, cell death and tissue damage. Progress with HDT development has been slowed down by the limited understanding of host-pathogen interactions during Mtb infection. Screens of the whole human genome can identify novel genes involved in the immune responses to Mtb infection and susceptibility to TB. Previously, we successfully used genome-wide association studies to identify human genes associated with susceptibility to TB. Here, we will for the first time use the groundbreaking CRISPR technology to screen the human genome in macrophages infected with Mtb and discover genes that are critically involved in host-pathogen interactions. Then, we will comprehensively characterise pathways that mediate impacts of these genes on both the human macrophage and the intracellular Mtb bacilli using dual transcriptome analyses and high-throughput microscopy assays. This novel approach will dissect crucial mechanisms of host-pathogen interaction during Mtb infection and will point to new targets for HDTs of TB.

Mots-clés : tuberculosis
Projet ERC : SPIDI (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, 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 : 2362230.0 €

With more than 2,000 confirmed exoplanets discovered to date, and about 4,000 additional candidates, it is now widely accepted that nearly every star in the Galaxy hosts a planetary system. These systems greatly differs from our Solar System: a vast majority of exoplanets revolves at a distance less than the Earth’s orbit (1 astronomical unit, 1 AU), and many orbit very close to their parent star indeed (<0.1 AU). These inner planets, with an orbital period less than 100 days, are quite diverse, ranging from Earth-like to Jupiter-like. How do they form or migrate close their star is still an open issue. ALMA and VLT/SPHERE recently released spectacular images of circumstellar disks around young stars, which exhibit large-scale structures (>10 AU), including rings, gaps, and spiral arms that presumably are the signposts of planet formation. Yet, as powerful as they are, imaging techniques are yet unable to probe the inner disk region. The goal of the SPIDI project is to investigate the origin and evolution of inner planetary systems. Specifically, we will develop dynamical models of inner planets embedded in the accretion disk of young stars to investigate the physical processes that govern the star-disk-planet interactions from 1 AU down to the stellar surface. From these models, we will then predict the observational signatures of disk-embedded inner planetary systems, and devise and implement observations that will allow us to detect them. This can only be done indirectly through simultaneous time domain photometry, spectroscopy, spectropolarimetry, and interferometry. Combined with current results obtained on larger scales, the SPIDI project will thus yield a synthetic view of nascent planetary systems, down to the inner edge of protoplanetary disks. It will bring clues to the origin of our own inner Solar System, and more generally, address the formation process and ubiquity of inner planetary systems throughout the Galaxy.
Projet ERC : IMPROVE (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : Tilburg University — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TiU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999747.5 €

With numerous failures to replicate, common misreporting of results, widespread failure to publish non-significant results or to share data, and considerable potential bias due the flexibility of analyses of data and researcher’s tendency to exploit that flexibility, psychological science is said to experience a crisis of confidence. These issues lead to dissemination of false positive results and inflate effect size estimates in meta-analyses. This leads to poor theory building, an inefficient scientific system, a waste of resources, lower trust in psychological science, and psychology’s outcomes being less useful for society. After having contributed to the literature highlighting these problems the goal of my ERC project is to improve psychological science by offering novel solutions to five vexing challenges: (1) I want to counter misreporting of results by using our new tool statcheck in several studies on reviewers’ tendency to demand perfection and by applying it to actual peer review. (2) I want to counter the biasing effects of common explorations of data (p-hacking) by professing and studying pre-registration and by developing promising new approaches called blind analysis and cross-validation using differential privacy that simultaneously allows for exploration and confirmation with the same data. (3) I want to counter the common problem of selective outcome reporting in psychological experiments by developing powerful latent variable methods that render it fruitless to not report all outcome variables in a study. (4) I want to counter the problem of publication bias by studying and correcting misinterpretations of non-significance. (5) I want to develop and refine meta-analytic methods that allow for the correction of biases that currently inflate estimates of effects and obscure moderation. The innovative tools I develop have the potential to improve the way psychologists (and other scientists) analyse data, disseminate findings, and draw inferences.

Mots-clés : research methods
Projet ERC : SHARECITY (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Social World and Its Diversity
Entité participante : Trinity College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1860008.75 €

With planetary urbanization fast approaching there is growing clarity regarding the unsustainability of cities, not least with respect to food consumption. Sharing, including food sharing, is increasingly being identified as one transformative mechanism for sustainable cities: reducing consumption; conserving resources, preventing waste and providing new forms of socio-economic relations. However, such claims currently rest on thin conceptual and empirical foundations. SHARECITY will identify and examine diverse practices of city-based food sharing economies, first determining their form, function and governance and then identifying their impact and potential to reorient eating practices. The research has four objectives: to advance theoretical understanding of contemporary food sharing economies in cities; to generate a significant body of comparative and novel international empirical knowledge about food sharing economies and their governance within global cities; to design and test an assessment framework for establishing the impact of city-based food sharing economies on societal relations, economic vitality and the environment; and to develop and implement a novel variant of backcasting to explore how food sharing economies within cities might evolve in the future. Providing conceptual insights that bridge sharing, social practice and urban transitions theories, SHARECITY will generate a typology of food sharing economies; a database of food sharing activities in 100 global cities; in-depth food sharing profiles of 7 cities from the contrasting contexts of USA, Brazil and Germany, Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Australia; a sustainability impact toolkit to enable examination of city-based food sharing initiatives; and scenarios for future food sharing in cities. Conducting such frontier science SHARECITY will open new research horizons to substantively improve understanding of how, why and to what end people share food within cities in the 21st Century.

Mots-clés : food consumption and waste,sharing economies,sustainable consumption,social practice,backcasting,urban transitions
Projet ERC : CSP (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
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 : 1952274.0 €

With the development of new location-based services and the expected deployment of cyber-physical systems (e.g., autonomous cars and drones) the reliance on location and time information in critical applications will only increase. Today's positioning systems are vulnerable to location spoofing by which devices can cheat on their own positions or can manipulate the measured positions of other devices. This problem cannot be fixed by a simple upgrade - existing positioning systems rely on legacy distance measurement techniques and protocols that were designed without security considerations or with security as an after-thought. We therefore need a new approach to the design of positioning systems that takes security requirements into account from the very start, and also accounts for the way that positioning systems are built and used. This is a cross-layer endeavor. In this project we will address the following fundamental questions: (1) Physical Layer. How can we design the right distance measurement (i.e., distance bounding) techniques that provide resilience to physical-layer and logical-layer attacks but retain the performance (range, accuracy and speed of execution) of equivalent non-secure systems? We will extend the existing knowledge in terms of the attacker models as well as achievable limits of security and performance of distance measurement techniques under realistic attacker models. (2) Link Layer. What are the right Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for secure positioning, what are their performance and scalability limits? (3) Systems. How can distance bounding be integrated in mobile platforms, especially with trusted execution environments. How can this integration strengthen the security of distance bounding and support its use in a wide range of applications?

Mots-clés : secure positioning,distance bounding
Projet ERC : DATACTIVE (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : University of Amsterdam — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UvA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498352.0 €

With the diffusion of ‘big data’, citizens become increasingly aware of the critical role of information in modern societies. This awareness gives rise to new social practices rooted in technology and data, which I term ‘data activism’. While activists see massive data collection by governments and businesses as a challenge to civil rights, big data also offer new opportunities for collective action. This research will investigate civil society’s engagement with massive data collection by addressing three research questions: How do citizens resist massive data collection by means of technical fixes (re-active data activism)? How do social movements use big data to foster social change (pro-active data activism)? How does data activism affect the dynamics of transnational civil society, and transnational advocacy networks in particular? The project will develop a multidisciplinary conceptual framework integrating social movement studies, science and technology studies and international relations. It will analyze organizational forms, action repertoires and the enabling role of software in data activism, and will identify emerging structures and strategies of transnational advocacy networks. Data will be collected via qualitative (interviews with activists, field observations, infrastructure ethnography on software platforms) and computational methods (such as data mining in online repositories). ‬ ‪This research is groundbreaking in four ways: 1) by analyzing civil society’s engagement with massive data collection, it evaluates risks and promises of big data; 2) by addressing an uncharted but rapidly growing field of human action, it sets the basis for understanding future civic engagement; 3) by integrating adjacent disciplines that seldom interact, it magnifies their ability to understand the interplay between society, information, technology and power; 4) by developing dedicated data collection tools, it adds to methodological innovation in big-data analytics.

Mots-clés : digital technology,technical activism,open source software development,resistance to massive data collection,data journalism,information policy,transnational advocacy network
Projet ERC : VITAE (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : CNRS Innovation — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 12500.0 €

With the recent discovery that brain blood flow decreases — in a statistical and epidemiologic sense — before accumulation of neurotoxic deposits (e.g. amyloid and tau) and before any measurable cognitive deficits, the brain vascular system is increasingly recognized as a key player in the development of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). This opens the way for the development of new disease-modifying therapeutic strategies targeting vascular pathways at early stages of AD, i.e. long before the neurodegenerative process becomes established and symptomatic. The central idea of this POC proposal is that High Performance Computing (HPC) assessment of cerebrovascular function from quantitative vessel network data will tremendously accelerate vascular-targeted drug development for neurodegenerative brain diseases. One of the key outputs of the research conduced in the ERC Consolidator BrainMicroFlow is indeed a HPC platform for modeling blood flow, nutrient delivery and metabolic waste removal in large anatomical vessel networks of the brain. However, using this platform requires advanced and specific parallel programing skills, which are in general not available, neither in the research nor in the R&D industrial environments focused on Alzheimer Disease. Thus, our aims are 1/ to upgrade the technical specifications of this platform and to develop a user-friendly and versatile interface, documentation and support, to create a new software, called VITAE, meeting the industry standards, that users with minimal programming skills could use on their own or local computational resources; 2/ to optimize the HPC capacities of VITAE so that its performances can reach the scale of a whole mouse brain (VITAE4WholeBrain), that could be accessed as a service provided to end users by partnering computational centers; 3/ to assess the market and the competitors for both versions of VITAE; 4/ to determine IPR position and strategy, and 5/ to explore licensing and partnership possibilities.

Mots-clés : brain microcirculation,blood flow and mass transfers,high performance computing,software,in silico medicine,alzheimer s disease,cerebral blood flow,vascular targeted drug development,biomarkers
Projet ERC : BiTe (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : University of Cambridge — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : U. Cambridge
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999620.0 €

With the term symbiosis, biologists describe any type of close and long-term interaction between different organisms. Life diversity and ecosystems completely rely on such interactions therefore, especially in such rapid change environment, it is of utmost importance to understand their complexity and resilience. Within this proposal, I aim to develop a new platforms to study these interactions in a spatially and chemically-controlled environment and manufacture a new class of hybrid materials: sym-BIonic matTEr. In specific, with the focus of light-matter interaction and I aim to (1) create controllable platforms where symbiosis with different organisms can be systematically supported and studied (2) develop and “evolve” new hybrid-symbiotic relationships where one of the organisms is replaced by an artificial material (3) exploit the newly created relationships in real application. I envision that such systems will be capable to combine functionalities from the living words (such as sensing and autonomous response) that otherwise are very challenging to achieve only with artificial materials. As an example, I foresee to obtain novel pigments capable to sense the environment by encapsulating in symbiotic-hydrogels bacteria colonies capable of making structural colours, or to achieve novel bio-photovoltaic and bio-photoreactors by optimising light delivery in the photosynthetic living elements and to expand their life by optimising the matrix that host them.

Mots-clés : biomimetics,bio photonics