Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : HITCHIPDIAG (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Max Planck Society — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MPG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 147094.0 €

Rapid and Inexpensive Diagnosis of Heparin Induced Thrombocytopenia Using Glycan Arrays Containing Synthetic Glycosaminoglycans Heparin, a complex glycosaminoglycan (GAG) carbohydrate, is the most commonly used anticoagulant. Twelve million patients in the EU are treated annually for conditions including acute coronary syndrome, deep-vein thrombosis and cardiopulmonary bypass surgery. Heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT) is a dangerous adverse side effect of heparin administration. HIT-II develops after major surgery or dialysis and results in infarction, multi-organ failure and 20% mortality. In Europe 100,000 patients develop HIT-II annually. Currently, two HIT-II diagnostics are available. The HIPA and MAIPA tests detect antibodies against a complex of heparin and platelet factor 4 but suffer from low diagnostic specificity and accuracy. Faster, more reliable and cheaper methods to diagnose complications after administration of heparin are needed to improve patient wellbeing and reduce costs. The ERC Advanced grant AUTOHEPARIN yielded an instrument for the automated assembly of defined oligosaccharides. GAG glycan microarrays were produced by printing GAG oligosaccharides onto surfaces and used to screen patient blood. Specific glycan markers of high diagnostic value were discovered to detected HIT-II within minutes and reliabilities well above existing tests. The overall goal of the project is to establish the business model for a company that will focus on the production of GAG glycan arrays as HIT diagnostic. Specific activities include: 1) Development of standard protocols to detect HIT-II using GAG glycan microarray; 2) Plan and cost structure for GAG arrays production; 3) Analysis of the IP space and development of an IP strategy; 4) Evaluate potential markets and establish basis for commercial discussion with potential customers; 5) Prepare business plan for discussions with investors; 6) Incorporate company to commercialize GAG arrays as HIT diagnostic

Mots-clés : glycan arrays,heparin,oligosaccharides,diagnostic,automated synthesis,glycosaminoglycans
Projet ERC : V-ECHO (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : University of Exeter — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 36468.75 €

Rapid global change events such as mass extinctions punctuate Earth’s geological history. These have driven life’s evolution, shaping the world today. However, the exact processes that trigger or modulate them remain enigmatic. Episodes of large-scale volcanism, namely large igneous provinces (LIPs), are a prime contender. A major obstacle to unravelling the role of LIPs in rapid global change has been lack of a direct/unique proxy for volcanism in the sediments that record events. Without one, determining LIP occurrence and exact temporal relations is challenging, especially where the rock record of LIPs is incomplete. Recent studies have revealed the huge promise of mercury (Hg) as a marker of large-scale volcanism. However, while Hg-record acquisition is gaining pace, we still lack the vital process understanding of the proxy needed to realize its full potential. V-ECHO will test the overarching hypothesis: widespread mercury ‘spikes’ in the geological record are definitive evidence of LIP volcanism even in the absence of coeval lavas. V-ECHO will take an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to develop a process understanding of LIP perturbations to the global Hg cycle and how these translate into sedimentary records. It will address key questions on Hg sources (emission from magmas or thermal metamorphism of intruded rocks) and sinks (deposition pathways and sedimentary preservation). It will combine new measurements with novel experimental techniques and explore key differences in the global Hg cycle deep in Earth’s past. V-ECHO will test whether we can ‘sniff out’ the sedimentary echoes of lost LIPs, especially in the Palaeozoic and Neoproterozoic where the LIP record becomes ever sparser. It will explore proposed volcanic triggers for major Earth change events (e.g., oceanic anoxic events, ‘snowball Earths’) in unprecedented ways. V-ECHO promises a step-change in understanding of environmental impacts of LIP volcanism throughout Earth history.

Mots-clés : mercury  hg,large igneous provinces  lips,volcanology,igneous
Projet ERC : ORIENT (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : Associacao do instituto superior tecnico para a investigacao e desenvolvimento — Pays : Portugal — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : Ist id
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 313750.0 €

Rapid object identification is crucial for survival of all organisms, but poses daunting challenges if many stimuli compete for attention, and multiple sensory and motor systems are involved in the processing, programming and generating of an eye-head gaze-orienting response to a selected goal. How do normal and sensory-impaired brains decide which signals to integrate (“goal”), or suppress (“distracter”)? Audiovisual (AV) integration only helps for spatially and temporally aligned stimuli. However, sensory inputs differ markedly in their reliability, reference frames, and processing delays, yielding considerable spatial-temporal uncertainty to the brain. Vision and audition utilize coordinates that misalign whenever eyes and head move. Meanwhile, their sensory acuities vary across space and time in essentially different ways. As a result, assessing AV alignment poses major computational problems, which so far have only been studied for the simplest stimulus-response conditions. My groundbreaking approaches will tackle these problems on different levels, by applying dynamic eye-head coordination paradigms in complex environments, while systematically manipulating visual-vestibular-auditory context and uncertainty. I parametrically vary AV goal/distracter statistics, stimulus motion, and active vs. passive-evoked body movements. We perform advanced psychophysics to healthy subjects, and to patients with well-defined sensory disorders. We probe sensorimotor strategies of normal and impaired systems, by quantifying their acquisition of priors about the (changing) environment, and use of feedback about active or passive-induced self-motion of eyes and head. I challenge current eye-head control models by incorporating top-down adaptive processes and eye-head motor feedback in realistic cortical-midbrain networks. Our modeling will be critically tested on an autonomously learning humanoid robot, equipped with binocular foveal vision and human-like audition.

Mots-clés : multisensory integration,spatial perception,dynamic feedback control
Projet ERC : BLOCKCHAINSOCIETY (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Social World and Its Diversity
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 : 1499631.0 €

Recent advances in cryptography yielded the blockchain technology, which enables a radically new and decentralized method to maintain authoritative records, without the need of trusted intermediaries. Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency blockchain application has already demonstrated that it is possible to operate a purely cryptography-based, global, distributed, decentralized, anonymous financial network, independent from central and commercial banks, regulators and the state. The same technology is now being applied to other social domains (e.g. public registries of ownership and deeds, voting systems, the internet domain name registry). But research on the societal impact of blockchain innovation is scant, and we cannot properly assess its risks and promises. In addition, crucial knowledge is missing on how blockchain technologies can and should be regulated by law. The BlockchainSociety project focuses on three research questions. (1) What internal factors contribute to the success of a blockchain application? (2) How does society adopt blockchain? (3) How to regulate blockchain? It breaks new ground as it (1) maps the most important blockchain projects, their governance, and assesses their disruptive potential; (2) documents and analyses the social diffusion of the technology, and builds scenarios about the potential impact of blockchain diffusion; and (3) it creates an inventory of emerging policy responses, compares and assesses policy tools in terms of efficiency and impact. The project will (1) build the conceptual and methodological bridges between information law, the study of the self-governance of technological systems via Science and Technology Studies, and the study of collective control efforts of complex socio-technological assemblages via Internet Governance studies; (2) address the most pressing blockchain-specific regulatory challenges via the analysis of emerging policies, and the development of new proposals.

Mots-clés : blockchain,internet governance,information law,cyberlaw
Projet ERC : BUNGEE-TOOLS (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : University of London — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : U. London
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1450075.0 €

Recent advances in magnetic resonance (MR) acquisition technology are providing us with images of the human brain of increasing detail and resolution. While these images hold promise to greatly increase our understanding of such a complex organ, the neuroimaging community relies on tools (e.g. SPM, FSL, FreeSurfer) which, being over a decade old, were designed to work at much lower resolutions. These tools do not consider brain substructures that are visible in present-day scans, and this inability to capitalize on the vast improvement of MR is hampering progress in the neuroimaging field. In this ambitious project, which lies at the nexus of medical histology, neuroscience, biomedical imaging, computer vision and statistics, we propose to build a set of next-generation computational tools that will enable neuroimaging studies to take full advantage of the increased resolution of modern MR technology. The core of the tools will be an ultra-high resolution probabilistic atlas of the human brain, built upon multimodal data combining from histology and ex vivo MR. The resulting atlas will be used to analyze in vivo brain MR scans, which will require the development of Bayesian segmentation methods beyond the state of the art. The developed tools, which will be made freely available to the scientific community, will enable the analysis of MR data at a superior level of structural detail, opening completely new opportunities of research in neuroscience. Therefore, we expect the tools to have a tremendous impact on the quest to understand the human brain (in health and in disease), and ultimately on public health and the economy.

Mots-clés : medical image analysis,probabilistic atlases
Projet ERC : PALEoRIDER (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : Max Planck Society — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MPG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1997500.0 €

Recent ancient DNA studies have discovered a basal form of Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of bubonic plague, in 5,000 year-old individuals from Eastern and Central Europe. Even though this strain is an early form that does likely not survive in fleas and might have been less transmissible, the timing intriguingly coincides with a period of substantial societal changes. The archaeological record of 3rd millennium BC Europe clearly demonstrates the demise of terminal Stone Age and the rise of Bronze Age societies across the continent. This turnover has so far been explained by factors such as climatic changes or the advent of new metal working technologies and associated trading networks, which led to a reorganization of past societies. However, contemporaneous genomic data from ancient Europeans have attested major genetic upheavals in Europe 5,000 years ago, with an introgression of 75% genetic ancestry from mobile groups from the eastern steppes appearing in Central Europe. This substantial contribution suggests that early outbreaks of infectious diseases, such as plague, are a vital alternative explanation for large-scale population replacements and thus an attractive hypothesis for investigation. With well-preserved ancient human samples from relevant time periods and key regions in Europe at our disposal, we have a unique and ideal test case to track evolutionary relationships between the human genome and pathogens through time. We will specifically target an extensive number of variants in human immune-related loci using state-of-the-art DNA capture assays alongside deep sequencing of microbial shotgun and pathogen data, which permits a direct characterization of human-pathogen co-evolution. This unique temporal framework will allow us to detect loci under selection in humans and pathogens, and explore the role of infectious diseases and human mobility in past societies via an innovative paleo-epidemiological database and explicit modeling approaches.

Mots-clés : ancient dna,human genome,disease,migration,pathogen,selection,prehistory
Projet ERC : COMMIOS (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : Harvard University — Pays : Etats-Unis — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 0.0 €

Recent breakthroughs in ancient DNA and isotope analysis are transforming our understanding of diversity, mobility and social dynamics in the human past. COMMIOS integrates these cutting-edge methods on a scale not previously attempted, within a ground-breaking interdisciplinary framework, to provide a radically new vision of Iron Age communities in Britain (800 BC – AD 100) within their wider European context. At the broad scale, we will conduct the first concerted programme of genome-wide ancient DNA analysis on Iron Age populations anywhere in the world (c. 1000 individuals in the UK, 250 in Europe), mapping genetic clusters to shed light on ancient populations themselves and on their relationships to modern genetic patterning. Together with isotope analysis, and underpinned by both osteoarchaeological and cultural archaeological approaches, this will also enable us to directly address critical issues of population movement and inter-regional connectivity in Iron Age Europe. We will utilise the power of these new scientific methods to examine the structure and social dynamics of Iron Age societies in Britain, including household and kin-group composition, the identification of familial relationships, gender-specific mobility, and the development of social inequalities. Previously the preserve of cultural anthropologists studying recent societies, we will draw these questions into the archaeological domain, opening up new areas of enquiry for prehistoric societies. The scope and scale of the project represents a new departure for European archaeology, made possible by the coming-of-age of new analytical methods. Many of these have been pioneered by the project team, which comprises world-leaders in the fields of ancient DNA, isotope analysis, osteoarchaeology, chronological modelling and cultural archaeology. Although focussed on Iron Age Britain, the project will establish a new benchmark for future analyses of other regions and periods in Europe and beyond.

Mots-clés : iron age britain,iron age europe,ancient dna,isotope analysis,osteoarchaeology,social dynamics,funerary archaeology
Projet ERC : COMMIOS (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of Leicester — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 0.0 €

Recent breakthroughs in ancient DNA and isotope analysis are transforming our understanding of diversity, mobility and social dynamics in the human past. COMMIOS integrates these cutting-edge methods on a scale not previously attempted, within a ground-breaking interdisciplinary framework, to provide a radically new vision of Iron Age communities in Britain (800 BC – AD 100) within their wider European context. At the broad scale, we will conduct the first concerted programme of genome-wide ancient DNA analysis on Iron Age populations anywhere in the world (c. 1000 individuals in the UK, 250 in Europe), mapping genetic clusters to shed light on ancient populations themselves and on their relationships to modern genetic patterning. Together with isotope analysis, and underpinned by both osteoarchaeological and cultural archaeological approaches, this will also enable us to directly address critical issues of population movement and inter-regional connectivity in Iron Age Europe. We will utilise the power of these new scientific methods to examine the structure and social dynamics of Iron Age societies in Britain, including household and kin-group composition, the identification of familial relationships, gender-specific mobility, and the development of social inequalities. Previously the preserve of cultural anthropologists studying recent societies, we will draw these questions into the archaeological domain, opening up new areas of enquiry for prehistoric societies. The scope and scale of the project represents a new departure for European archaeology, made possible by the coming-of-age of new analytical methods. Many of these have been pioneered by the project team, which comprises world-leaders in the fields of ancient DNA, isotope analysis, osteoarchaeology, chronological modelling and cultural archaeology. Although focussed on Iron Age Britain, the project will establish a new benchmark for future analyses of other regions and periods in Europe and beyond.

Mots-clés : iron age britain,iron age europe,ancient dna,isotope analysis,osteoarchaeology,social dynamics,funerary archaeology
Projet ERC : TRUST (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Delft University of Technology — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TU Delft
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499515.0 €

Recent developments in sensing and communication technology offer unprecedented opportunities by ubiquitously collecting data at high detail and at large scale. Utilization of data at these scales, however, poses a major challenge for control systems, particularly in view of the additional inherent uncertainty that data-driven control signals introduce to systems behavior. In fact, this effect has not been well understood to this date, primarily due to the missing link between data analytics techniques in machine learning and the underlying physics of dynamical systems. I address this issue by proposing a novel control design paradigm embracing ideas from the emerging field of distributionally robust optimization (DRO). DRO is a decision-making model whose solutions are optimized against all distributions consistent with given prior information. Recent breakthrough work, among others by the PI of this proposal, has shown that many DRO models can be solved in polynomial time even when the corresponding stochastic models are intractable. DRO models also offer a more realistic account of uncertainty and mitigate the infamous "post-decision disappointment" of stochastic models. This proposal lays the theoretical foundation for distributionally robust control and aims to make progress along four directions. (i) Decision-dependent ambiguity: I introduce the concept of "invariant ambiguity sets" to encompass the dynamic evolution of uncertainty. (ii) Dynamic programming: I establish a dynamic programming characterization of the proposed DRO models and provide tractable approximation schemes along with rigorous theoretical bounds. (iii) Safe and memory-efficient learning: Leveraging modern tools from kernel methods and online-optimization, I propose tractable, yet provably reliable, synthesis tools. (iv) I plan to develop a tailor-made modeling language and open-source software to make distributionally robust control methods accessible in industry-size applications.

Mots-clés : control,distributionally robust optimization,dynamic programming,convex optimization,statistical learning
Projet ERC : BRCA-ERC (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative Biology: from Genes and Genomes to Systems
Entité participante : General University Hospital in Prague — Pays : Rép. Tchèque — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : VFN
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 80000.0 €

Recent evidence demonstrates that cancer is overtaking cardiovascular disease as the number one cause of mortality in Europe. This is largely due to the lack of preventative measures for common (e.g. breast) or highly fatal (e.g. ovarian) human cancers. Most cancers are multifactorial in origin. The core hypothesis of this research programme is that the extremely high risk of BRCA1/2 germline mutation carriers to develop breast and ovarian cancer is a net consequence of cell-autonomous (direct effect of BRCA mutation in cells at risk) and cell non-autonomous (produced in distant organs and affecting organs at risk) factors which both trigger epigenetic, cancer-initiating effects. The project’s aims are centered around the principles of systems medicine and built on a large cohort of BRCA mutation carriers and controls who will be offered newly established cancer screening programmes. We will uncover how ‘cell non-autonomous’ factors work, provide detail on the epigenetic changes in at-risk tissues and investigate whether these changes are mechanistically linked to cancer, study whether we can neutralise this process and measure success in the organs at risk, and ideally in easy to access samples such as blood, buccal and cervical cells. In my Department for Women’s Cancer we have assembled a powerful interdisciplinary team including computational biologists, functionalists, immunologists and clinician scientists linked to leading patient advocacy groups which is extremely well placed to lead this pioneering project to develop the fundamental understanding of cancer development in women with BRCA mutations. To reset the epigenome, re-establishing normal cell identity and consequently reducing cancer risk without the need for surgery and being able to monitor the efficacy using multicellular epigenetic outcome predictors will be a major scientific and medical breakthrough and possibly applicable to other chronic diseases.

Mots-clés : cancer and its biological basis,women s cancers,breast cancer,ovarian cancer,brca1,2 mutation,cell non autonomous,hormones,prevention,early diagnosis,surrogate markers