Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : Berti-Chip (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Murcie — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UM
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Data prefetchers are ubiquitous in current high-performance computers such as those manufactured by Intel, ARM, AMD, or IBM, as they play a fundamental role in hiding long-latency memory accesses. Prefetchers predict the data that will be needed by a processor in the future and fetch such data ahead of execution. State-of-the-art data prefetchers, push the limits of performance but often without caring about energy efficiency. The energy efficiency of a prefetcher is dictated by its accuracy, which measures the percentage of data moved by the prefetcher that satisfies the processor demands.  Berti is a data prefetcher sited at the first-level data cache (L1D) that makes a compelling case for timeliness and accuracy. Berti can boost processors performance by 33% (with respect to those not using prefetching mechanisms) and 8.5% (when compared to mainstream prefetchers) while providing an accuracy above 90%, which translates into a low energy overhead of the memory hierarchy. In addition, Berti is a cost-effective prefetcher that just requires 2.55KB of storage.  The objective of this project is to elaborate a hardware design for the Berti data prefetcher, as we strongly believe that the notable boost in processor performance and efficiency along with its design simplicity makes Berti a serious candidate both for the emerging low-power edge market and for high-performance computers.
Projet ERC : Pneu-Haptics (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : KTH Institut royal de technologie — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

There is an on-going societal shift from manual vehicles to semi-autonomous vehicles, which will fundamentally alter the practical, emotional and somatic experience of driving cars, trucks, trains, and even tractors. At the same time, innovations in strategies for communicating with the driver have not advanced beyond the utilization of visual and audio modalities. As the driving experience becomes more complex this has led to an overwhelming cognitive experience consisting of excessive blinking and beeping. Pneu-Haptics is a new approach to this problem of communication with the driver. Making use of pneumatically powered haptic cues embedded within the seat, Pneu-Haptics utilises the intelligence that resides in our bodies by touching and gently moving larger body parts in ways which can somatically and intuitively create conditions for action or emotion. For example, by dynamically changing the support of a driver’s back area, the driver’s posture can be altered from a slouched and more relaxed position to an erect and alert postural state that readies the driver for taking back control of the vehicle. This ERC PoC project will evaluate whether such an approach can improve the passive safety of the driver by moving beyond approaches which rely on pure symbolic meaning and cognitive reasoning. While at the same time make the driving a smoother and non-disruptive experience. The goal of the Pneu-Haptics PoC project is to demonstrate the effectiveness and value of Pneu-Haptics as a new modality for enabling communication and collaboration between a driver and a vehicle in a way which is a dignified aesthetic experience. Together the research team will produce a robust demonstrator for testing and demonstrating to Pneu-Haptics to relevant industries, establish a ‘killer’ app and industry for Pneu-Haptics and develop a business plan for bringing Pneu-Haptics to market.
Projet ERC : TEAXON (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université Pompeu Fabra — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UPF
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Within the eAXON project, which is funded by an ERC CoG, we have developed and demonstrated wireless microstimulators whose operation is based on rectification of volume conducted bursts of innocuous high-frequency current externally delivered through textile electrodes. In contrast to previous implantable stimulation technologies apt for clinical use, our technology allows the implementation of much thinner implants that can be minimally invasively deployed by injection. Our prototypes are threadlike, with a diameter of less than 1 mm, and consist of a silicone tubular body with two electrodes at the opposite ends and a titanium capsule in the middle that hermetically houses the electronics. Such a degree of miniaturization is possible because our technology avoids the need for bulky components within the implants (e.g., batteries or coils). The proposed PoC project is essentially intended to facilitate the exploitation of this technology for therapeutics based on electrical stimulation.
Projet ERC : VIMEG (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Numerous industrial and scientific processes are conducted under vacuum conditions for improved cleanliness and control. Monitoring the vacuum level is crucial to ensure consistent process results. Ionization gauges represent the state-of-the-art for measuring residual gas pressure at high and ultrahigh vacuum levels. Here we propose to establish an alternative pressure gauge based on measuring the gas friction experienced by a nanomechanical membrane resonator with ultralow intrinsic damping. This approach promises more compact, durable, and accurate gauges that cover a wider pressure range than conventional ionization gauges.
Projet ERC : SSPIN (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Currently there is no broadly available strategy to perform large-scale sex and species identification on morphologically non-informative bone and tooth specimens from paleontological, palaeoanthropological and archaeological contexts. SSPIN aims to the creation of a service platform to democratise species and sex identification from these materials by developing and deploying a new high-resolution mass spectrometry-based approach. SSPIN will dramatically increase throughput at all levels of the workflow, i.e. sample preparation, data acquisition and data analysis, whilst simultaneously lowering the operator’s involvement. Automation will empower a service platform offering to the end-user access to the technology currently out of reach to all but a few specialised laboratories world-wide. Research projects that are simply unsustainable with the current solutions will move within reach on a global scale.
Projet ERC : NASHTARGET (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

This research focuses on the increasing prevalence of metabolic liver disease, specifically non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), which is driven by obesity, diabetes, and its related causal connections. NASH is a significant medical challenge with no approved treatments, causing a substantial economic burden. The project aims to investigate the role of oxidative stress in NASH development and progression. By targeting the MAP kinases p38 and JNK, which drive the inflammatory and fibrotic aspects of NASH, our research could lead to new treatment approaches.
Projet ERC : SECURE-FLEXIMAG (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université autonome de Barcelone — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Traditional methods of safeguarding data often fall short in today’s rapidly evolving information technology landscape. Passwords are vulnerable to hacking, and while encryption offers enhanced security, it significantly increases data processing costs and slows performance. Storing secret keys in battery-backed memory is also inefficient in terms of energy consumption. The advent of physical unclonable functions (PUFs), which create unique device fingerprints based on random physical properties, marked a significant leap in hardware-level data security. Despite recent progress in PUF technology, challenges such as energy efficiency, cost, scalability, randomness, and reconfigurability remain. Overcoming these hurdles requires innovative materials and designs. SECURE-FLEXIMAG aims to strengthen data security and promote technology transfer by building on the PI's recent research in three key areas: (i) magneto-ionics, (ii) exchange coupling to lock access to data and (iii) stochastic magnetization reversal phenomena in arrays of magnetic dots. These effects can be synergistically combined to develop an advanced data-security device that will largely surpass conventional password methods and current PUF approaches. The project will explore market prospects and business development strategies in collaboration with various stakeholders and potential end users.

Mots-clés : magneto ionics,magnetic,energy efficiency,data security,physical unclonable function
Projet ERC : VectorFieldImaging (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université autonome de Madrid — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The invention of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and of other similar devices was a revolution for research at atomic scale. Many companies offer microscopes which can be used to study materials at atomic scale as a function of temperature or magnetic field. However, unlike temperature, the magnetic field is a vector quantity. The direction of the magnetic field vector is as important as its magnitude when it comes to study properties of materials at atomic scale. The only solution available today to vary the vector of the magnetic field is to build a set of three separate solenoids, with which one can generate separately the three components of the magnetic field vector. However, this unavoidably implies a significant reduction of the magnitude of the largest vectorial fields that one can obtain, typically at most 1-2 T. The EU proposal VectorFieldImaging will overcome this challenge by developing new technology to modify the orientation of the entire microscope with respect to the solenoid. This will provide a significantly less-costly solution that will allow the direction of the magnetic field to be varied at the highest available magnetic fields, opening the door to the microscopic studies of many quantum phenomena. Specifically, the project will focus on a proof of concept by establishing technical feasibility, usability and commercialization of prototypes that allow turning a STM inside a high magnetic field solenoid tested in an operational environment by end users. If successful, this technology will make a real breakthrough in the area of quantum materials by allowing visualization by means of scanning probes at very high vectorial magnetic fields.
Projet ERC : WAVEAD (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de l'est de la Finlande — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Due to the early AD-related pathology present in a subpopulation of idiopathic normal pressure hydrocephalus (iNPH) patients, the brains of the iNPH patients offer a unique window to evaluate events taking place during the course of AD pathology progression. Here we take advantage of our continuous access to living brain biopsies from iNPH patients and related clinical data to assess, how AD pathology affects the neuronal circuit operational properties in human brain. During the ERC consolidator project, we have discovered that pre-existing AD-related pathology alters neuronal circuit operational properties, and importantly, impairs the ablity of the network to elicit synaptic strenthening, as evaluated using stimulation protocols on multielectrode arrays (MEA). Interestingly, a supervised machine-learning -based classifier was able to classify and predict the patient pathological status using the synaptic plasticity -induced waveforms. Here we now investigate the whether the waveforms related to glutamatergic signaling and cholinergic signaling have similar predictive value of the patient pathological status and possible clinical diagnosis and whether these readouts obtained from the ex vivo biopsies are correlated in the clinical settings using transcranial magnetic stimulations (TMS) and EEG recordings. Moreover, we probe whether the recorded TMS and EEG waveforms have the same predictive capacity in clinical settings. If succesful, these waveforms could facilitate personalized therapy or serve as a diagnostic tool for detection of early AD and thus have a significant commercialization potential.
Projet ERC : BLOODSPEED (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Institute of Fundamental Technological Research — Pays : Pologne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : IPPT;IPPT PAN
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 75000.0 €

Tissue O2 delivery is essential for life and rate-limiting for activities. Its maintenance is paramount in medical conditions ranging from critical care to anaemia, and a common corrective intervention is blood transfusion, drawing an annual demand of >20 units/1000 people. Blood tests are routinely performed (2/capita/year in Europe) to measure surrogates of O2-carrying capacity, such as haemoglobin content, driving a global market worth €10B. However, current diagnostics cannot measure the speed of O2 release from red blood cells (RBCs), a parameter as important in determining tissue oxygenation as O2-carrying capacity and particularly labile in haematological disease and blood storage. To address this unmet need, we developed single-cell oxygen saturation imaging, a method for tracking O2 release from individual RBCs. We demonstrated how O2-unloading depends critically on the shape and metabolic state of RBCs, providing a gauge of the blood’s physiological quality. Notably, our method described slower O2 unloading in spherocytic anaemias and in banked blood units. To verify significance, we showed how impaired O2 release from stored RBCs reduces oxygenation and respiration in perfused human kidneys. End-users of our technology are blood-banks (quality control, recipient-donor matching, guiding improvements in materials and methods) and clinicians (novel haematological traits, transfusion, transplant medicine). However, further data are required to re-affirm the medical utility and market for our novel parameter. Teaming with engineers and industry, this project will design and assemble three benchtop prototypes of our device for proof-of-concept testing in a blood bank (UK’s NHSBT), intensive care (Great Ormond St Hospital), and haematological research (Peru). Positive experience will make a compelling case for measuring O2-handling. Our ambition is to produce a next-generation haematology analyser as a spin-out, or for acquisition by a major commercial partner.
Projet ERC : hmqPro (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Epigenica ab — Pays : Suède — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : Epigenica
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 120000.0 €

The project will develop a multipurpose, highly multiplexed, quantitative protein profiling (hmqPro) platform that can be adapted to a wide range of applications, particularly biomarker discovery. Biomarkers are a 43 Billion USD market spanning applications in diagnostics, drug discovery & development, personalized medicine, disease risk assessment. The method comprises an antibody-based profiling of a large number of proteins or protein posttranslational modifications against a large number of samples irrespective of source. Unlike competitor methods, hmqPro does not require platform-specific assay or detection equipment. Dual multiplexing implemented in a variant method, hmqPro-2D, will make the platform competitive against existing protein profiling methods in per-assay cost, flexibility and scalability. The hmqPro platform uniquely complements the technology portfolio of Epigenica AB and we will chart out two commercialization routes: first, hmqPro will be integrated into a service laboratory offering high-throughput sample-to-result epigenome and protein profiling services to academia, pharma and biotech industries. Second, we will package the method in a kit format distributed to R&D and clinical end users. In summary, the proposed project will deliver a new quantitative protein profiling platform that will have the capacity to impact the biomarker discovery market by combining unique flexibility with high-throughput.
Projet ERC : ICONIC (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Metalot future energy lab bv — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : METALOT FEL
Type d'entité : Autres
Financement ERC de l'entité : 97000.0 €

Iron Power is a new technology to store and transport sustainable energy. An iron aerosol mixture is burned in a flame and the heat is used in high temperature processes. The formed iron-oxide powder is collected and transported to places with a surplus of green hydrogen, where it is regenerated back to iron powder. As such, Iron Power is a very promising CO2-free circular energy carrier of sustainable energy, which has a very high energy density, is easy to handle, safe, environmentally friendly and cheap. Within the fast growing Iron Power community, existing solid fuel combustion concepts are applied mostly, but these show severe problems caused by the specific character of iron aerosol flames: a) flame stabilisation is difficult to establish, b) nano-particles and c) high NOx emissions are also difficult to circumvent. A completely new combustion concept is needed to solve the problems. The ERC program MetalFuel creates the basic knowledge on metal aerosol combustion with the right ingredients to do solve these problems. The combustion concept developed is called ICONIC (Ignition COntrolled low-Nox Iron Combustion). Within this ERC PoC a well-controllable ICONIC burner will be developed, designed, tested and patented. A small-scale system will be developed and studied first, after which a conceptual design of Mega-Watt size will be developed which will enable future implementation in an industrial-scale system. Furthermore, the possible future market will be evaluated. A start-up is already interested and a launching customer seems to be in view, if the PoC is successful.
Projet ERC : QOVID (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : CNRS Innovation — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 5000.0 €

The global-scale pandemic crisis of COVID-19 requires precise and immediate technological solutions for virological and serological diagnosis tests. These tests must be accurate, rapid, intelligent, and cost-efficient to prevent future rebounds of infections and help control the pandemic. In this context, the Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) industry, especially piezoelectric resonators of all shapes and sizes, is a promising strategy to revolutionize the biological detection market. Ultrahigh sensitive nanomechanical resonators showed the potential of this technology for mass loading. Unfortunately, applying MEMS to the biomedical sector requires challenging qualities, making it often unattainable to material scientists and engineers. QOVID offers a solution to fill this gap between MEMS and biomedicine by developing a commercialization solution for piezoelectric α-quartz resonating devices to detect the mass response of SARS-CoV-2 spike molecular interactions as an original readout of viral loads. QOVID builds on the technology developed during the ERC Starting Grant SENSiSOFT to provide a user-friendly versatile Bio-MEMS sensor prototype that will give researchers in the life sciences and biomedical sector without an engineering or electronic training a reliable diagnostic tool to detect SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses. QOVID will scale up a new generation of On-chip epitaxial piezoelectric α-quartz/Si MEMS manufactured exclusively by soft-chemistry with CMOS-compatible processes offering cost-efficient single-chip solutions not only for biomedical applications but also for many other fields. These α-quartz bioMEMS will have thicknesses between 200 nm and 1 µm, this is between 10 to 50 times thinner and 10 to 100 times more sensitive than those obtained by traditional top-down technologies on bulk crystals. QOVID will pursue commercialization and market solutions both within academia and the biotechnology and biomedical among other sectors.
Projet ERC : ArtSilkTex (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université suédoise des sciences agricoles — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : SLU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

ArtSilkTex builds on the ERC-funded project ARTSILK, in which we recently have succeeded in 1) producing artificial spider silk on a scale that, for the first time, opens up the possibility of producing the material for industrial use and 2) inventing engineered spider silk proteins that can be spun into fibers with significantly enhanced mechancial properties. In this project we will manufacture artificial spider silk yarns that will be benchmarked against commonly used yarns on the market. The breakthrough potential of an environmentally friendly, biobased high-performance fiber is great and our work is expected to result in a material that can be used or many applications and replace some of the petroleum-based synthetic fibers on the market. To pinpoint which markets and applications that are most suitable to target, get a better understanding of our competitors, and to ensure the best possible prerequisites for taking this material to the market, the project comprise four main activities: 1) generation of an IP strategy, 2) a thorough analysis of the material's life cycle, cost of goods and carbon footprint, 3) generation of artificial spider silk yarns and benchmarking against other materials, and 4) business development including setting up a business plan and the launch of a spinn-off company. We have a strong project team with highly motivated and experienced members with complimentary backgrounds, and we have an established collaborations with large international companies and potential future customers.