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

Fluorinated motifs have enormous societal relevance due to their ubiquity across the pharmaceutical, agrochemical and materials science sectors. These essential structural components feature prominently in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) list of essential medicines, and contribute to global food supplies by optimising the performance of many key agrochemicals. Similarly, our reliance on (polyfluorinated) materials ranging from non-stick Teflon® through to smart materials underscores the versatility of fluorinated groups in functional small molecule design. The historic success of fluorinated groups in societally-important molecules, coupled with scarcity of organofluorine building blocks in nature, continues to create a powerful impetus to develop more efficient and sustainable methods to facilitate their construction. However, the environmental impact of perfluorinated materials has come under scrutiny due to the persistence of the materials in the environment. The recent proposal by the European Parliament to address the persistence of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS-type molecules) in water supplies covers "any substance that contains at least one fully fluorinated methyl (CF3) or methylene (CF2) without any H, Cl, Br, or I attached to it." Fluorinated groups that simultaneously conform to new legislative guidance, no longer pose an environmental threat and open up new areas of space for discovery will be generated efficiently. Through the intervention of ChiroFluor, unique structural entities such as the BITE group will be forged in both enantiomeric forms (handedness) to push chemical space beyond the existing boundaries. This project will simultaneously address a pressing environmental and legislative issue in a sustainable manner using an organocatalytic I(I)/I(III) platform based on data generated in ERC Consolidator RECON (818949), and validated with key industrial partners.
Projet ERC : PROVISO (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Académie royale néerlandaise des arts et des sciences — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KNAW
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Approximately forty million people across the world are blind, a condition with serious consequences for a person’s autonomy. Restoration of visual function in blind individuals is an important scientific goal with large societal benefits. In a large fraction of blind patients, the connection between the eye and the brain has degenerated so that restoration of a rudimentary form of vision can only be achieved in pathways downstream from the retina, like the visual cortex. PROVISO tests the feasibility of a new approach for a cortical visual prosthesis by implanting flexible polymer electrodes into the visual cortex that can be stimulated electrically to create a rudimentary form of vision. Weak electrical currents applied to an electrode in the visual cortex induce an artificial percept of light, called “phosphene”. Multiple phosphenes can be used to build up a shape, just as the lights of a matrix board along the highway generate letters. A promising approach to restore vision involves inserting tiny electrodes into the visual cortex, close to the neurons, so that weak currents result in phosphene perception. There are two problems that need to be solved before the prosthesis can become a treatment for blind individuals. The first problem is that the electrodes available for chronic implantation are made of silicon or metal, which causes a tissue response (gliosis) causing the interface with the tissue to degrade after several months. The second problem is coverage of the visual field. In humans, much of primary visual cortex (V1) is not located on the surface of the brain, but inside a sulcus, making it difficult to access. PROVISO will develop methods to implant flexible electrodes, that cause little tissue damage and remain functional across longer time scales, into the brain. These electrodes will be implanted deep into several brain areas, thereby providing a good coverage of the visual field.
Projet ERC : OncoID (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Académie royale néerlandaise des arts et des sciences — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KNAW
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Over recent years, cancer diagnostics based on cell-free DNA (cfDNA) in liquid biopsies demonstrated great promise in guiding treatment and screening for recurrent diseases. Current diagnostic strategies are mainly based on the analyses of DNA mutations, fragment length or DNA methylation status. However, these strategies do not provide a universal approach for cancer identification, are costly and labour intensive, and generally fall short in detecting cancer at early tumorigenic stages or minimal residual disease. An underexplored field, is the development of diagnostic applications based on histone post-translational modifications (PTMs). The strategy to harness these epigenetic signatures to identify cell-of-origin is potentially superior over state-of-the art methods because it offers targeted and multiplexed amplifications of exclusively informative genomic regions (i.e. promoters and enhancers). Such strategies are cost-effective and display much increased sensitivity over existing methods in their accuracy in e.g. early cancer diagnoses, relapse detection or screenings. Unfortunately, the development of this field is hampered by a lack of methods that are sensitive enough to detect multilayered histone PTM-signatures in samples with limited material such as blood plasma. This proposal describes our plan to implement two new strategies, for ultra-sensitive detection of multi-layered histone PTMs signatures in blood plasma. Our proposal outlines 1) a research plan for the implementation and optimization of these strategies to profile histone PTM profiles in plasma of healthy and patient material to determine the diagnostic potential of the method and 2) develop a market strategy and navigate product development opportunities for commercialization of the method. Successful execution of this proposal will result in the establishment of a novel diagnostic strategy with unprecedented potential for universal cancer screening-approaches based on liquid biopsies.

Mots-clés : cell free dna,epigenetics,cancer diagnostics
Projet ERC : Cohesin-Tx (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Research Institute of Molecular Pathology — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : IMP
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The cohesin gene STAG2 has emerged as a new tumour suppressor frequently mutated in bladder cancer, Ewing sarcoma and acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). Currently, these cancers are treated by cytotoxic therapies and surgery. These treatment plans are limited by unwanted side effects, have not been able to eliminate the high mortality caused by AML, and have not improved over the last few decades. STAG2 mutations are therefore a biomarker for cancer patients with high medical need. We discovered that STAG2 mutated cancer cells are highly vulnerable to the inactivation of another protein, called STAG1, while healthy cells remain unaffected. This highly selective sensitivity of cancer cells towards such a treatment is exceptional and could be exploited for precision medicine. Our long-term aim is therefore to develop STAG1 inhibitors. This precision medicine would greatly decrease side effects and costs, from which patients, doctors, and health insurance companies would benefit. To enable the development of such a STAG1 inhibitor, exploring the innovation potential is essential. For this, several “stepping stones” need to be reached which we would like to achieve with support of this ERC-PoC grant: (1) optimising our building blocks for a STAG1 inhibitor (2) developing an intellectual property strategy, (3) assessing commercial feasibility and (4) developing a business plan. Altogether, this will result in a proposition package that can be used to present the commercial potential to strategic partners. For this purpose, we have assembled a team that shares the same enthusiasm to achieve our common goal: to develop precision medicine for patients suffering from STAG2 mutated cancer.
Projet ERC : BIO-LINKER (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Dortmund — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 95075.0 €

Fluorescence techniques are indispensable tools at the heart of basic research, medical diagnostics, cancer research, personalized medicine and drug screening. Their merits are not limited by physical instrumentation, but by the performance and properties of the employed fluorescent probes. All commercially available fluorophores – with a market potential of 2 billion € per year and an annual growth rate of ~8% – suffer from three fundamental problems: (i) Phototoxicity and poor signal quality, (ii) requirement for functional properties such as blinking emission, sensor capabilities or high photostability, and (iii) their limitations to be used in more than one specific application, e.g., for lipid-staining, organelle marking, DNA sequencing or single-molecule detection. Consequences of these problems can be loss of information in biomedical assays (e.g., via a too rapidly vanishing signal) resulting for example in an incorrect medical diagnosis or false positive hits in drug screening. My lab has developed a solution to these fundamental problems within the context of my ERC starting grant “SM-IMPORT”. We established a versatile class of ‘linker’ compounds that allow selective labelling of biological targets in vitro and in vivo with a (commercial) fluorophore, which becomes tuneable in all of its properties via the linker. With such a simple strategy, users in all branches of academic and industry research, but also in biomedicine will be able to modify properties of commercially available fluorophores preserving their standard labelling protocols – reducing assay costs and improving reliability. In this proof-of-concept grant, I want to explore the potential of our established linker library for commercial use.
Projet ERC : EO4FoodSecurity (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université technique de Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Characterizing the state of global food security is essential in devising and evaluating policies and programs for effective decision making. The concept of food security is multidimensional and dynamic and is often compounded by the challenge of obtaining relevant data. Moreover, finding appropriate indicators that specifically encompass the four dimensions of food security (including physical availability of food, economic and physical access to food, food utilization, and sustainability) as specified by UN FAO remains a challenging task. There exist variety of different measures for assessing the food security situation, but they merely focus on nutrition and physical aspects and thus provide incomplete assessments related to the problem. In this PoC project, I aim to extend the unique AI algorithms and the big EO data management features developed in the ERC StG “So2Sat” to characterize the state of global food security on regional scales using multimodal data derived from satellite imagery and auxiliary open data, and offer our software as a commercial, integrated service. Within the PoC, a comprehensive business case that will assist us in designing an exploitation strategy will be developed. Achieving these objectives will augment the capability of our existing AI solution for land cover/land use mapping to infer the crucial aspects of food security and sustainability. Our value proposition in EO4FoodSecurity is a set of professional solutions to extract relevant indicators for characterizing food security by retrieving them from big EO data and other open sources using AI. E.g., generating land use map and using it along with other information extraction modules of So2Sat (such as population density, road and building footprints) and other open data (e.g., meteorological, nutrition) to generate food security map at unprecedented finer spatial and temporal scales. We aim to support these solutions in an easy-to-use, interactive big EO data analysis platform.
Projet ERC : REPAIR (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Genève — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UniGe
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Diabetes affects some 500 million people worldwide (estimated 700 million by 2045), causing over one million deaths annually. The disease results from the loss / dysfunction of pancreatic islet insulin-producing β-cells, leading to chronic hyperglycemia and severe complications. Current treatments are symptomatic and fail to restore long-term glucose regulation, stressing the need for a transformative curative approach. Our proposal leverages α-cell reprogramming as a novel therapy for the restoration of insulin-production in situ, i.e. in the pancreas of diabetics. Islet α-cells remain abundant in diabetic patients and, along with δ- and γ-cells, they possess intrinsic plasticity, meaning that they can “learn” to produce insulin (Nature, 2010 & 2014; Diab Obes Metab, 2016; Nat Cell Biol, 2018; Nat Comm, 2021). Recently, we have shown that if all islet non-β-cells were converted into insulin producers, the islets containing only insulin-producing cells would be perfectly viable and functional, keeping optimal glucose homeostasis (Nat Metab, 2024). We have also reported that genetically reprogrammed human α-cells can secrete insulin and restore normal glucose levels when transplanted to diabetic mice (Nature, 2019). These findings establish islet non-β-cell reprogramming as a viable innovative strategy for diabetes cure. Here, we aim at developing a first-in-class, non-genetic therapy to induce in situ α-cell reprogramming using small molecules. From a targeted screening we identified six FDA-approved compounds that induce insulin expression above a reprogramming threshold in purified α-cells from 2 donors. We will now explore their mechanism of action re the functional conversion and conduct preclinical studies in healthy and diabetic mice to assess reprogramming efficiency in both endogenous and transplanted human cells. If successful, this approach could transform diabetes therapy, offering a safe and clinically viable alternative to current treatments.

Mots-clés : diabetes,cell dysfunction,cell reprogramming,insulin production,small molecules,islet plasticity,glucose homeostasis,non genetic therapy,fda approved compounds,preclinical studies
Projet ERC : VERIPROB (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université technique de Rhénanie-Westphalie à Aix-la-Chapelle — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Program correctness is a central problem in computer science. Code inspection and testing can reveal many program bugs, but subtle errors need a rigorous analysis. A fully automated analysis is impossible: deciding whether a program terminates on a given input is undecidable. Thanks to unremitting developments in program verification and incredible advancements in satisfiability checking, program verification is nowadays supported by software tools in industrial practice. Meta and Amazon Web Services use program verification tools on a daily basis.  In the advent of AI, probabilistic programming emerged as a popular paradigm combining programming with learning from (big) data. Since 2018, the UN uses such probabilistic programs to predict the location and classify seismological activities on the earth. Other application areas include security, planning in AI, cognitive science, and neural network training. Probabilistic programs are fundamentally different. Due to randomness, they sometimes terminate and sometimes not. Their outcome depends on coin flips. They may terminate with probability one, while having an infinite expected run time. Classical program verification techniques no longer apply. The ERC project FRAPPANT has resulted in proof calculi for probabilistic programs, equipped with powerful proof rules, and identified a relative complete syntax for quantitative properties. This has led to a prototypical deductive verifier for an “assembler” programming language. A software tool for which no equivalent exists. Successful analyses of intricate programs showed its potential. The proposed project aims to explore the commercial and innovative aspects of our deductive verifier. It takes the necessary innovative steps to enable a commercialisation by including invariant synthesis and program slicing and supporting the popular probabilistic programming language STAN. Its potential will be investigated engaging potential users, and a market analysis.
Projet ERC : ONCO-SPLICE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

In our effort to characterize metabolic activities in the cell’s nucleus, we discovered that the understudied Tudor domain protein SMNDC1 controls the repression of insulin in pancreatic alpha cells through its role as a splicing modulator. Based on this finding, we developed the first selective SMNDC1 Tudor domain inhibitors, for which we observe interesting preliminary data on insulin induction in primary human pancreatic islets. However, as a pan-essential gene expressed in most tissues, SMNDC1 is not an ideal therapeutic target in diabetes, where exceptionally high safety margins are required. Interestingly, independent findings published in a preprint established a role for SMNDC1 in cancer. These data show that SMNDC1 controls splicing of the ERK1 exon that bears the phosphorylation signal mediating RAS/RAF/MEK/ERK signaling. A significant fraction of ovarian and pancreatic carcinomas harbor SMNDC1 amplifications, and cells derived from these tumors depend on SMNDC1 both in vitro and in xenograft models. We here propose to evaluate the potential of our SMNDC1 inhibitors for cancer therapy. Experimentally, we will test these compounds in the ERK1 splicing dependent models in collaboration with the groups that described these findings, and we will profile their antiproliferative effects against a panel of >900 cancer cell lines. In parallel, we will conduct detailed analysis on the chemical scaffolds we discovered and develop a medicinal chemistry proposal to expand the scope of the filed patent application. Additionally, we will commission analyses for an optimal translation pathway of these compounds to the clinic, aiming an ideal positioning for certain cancer subtypes based on market size, competitive situation, clinical needs and trial design opportunities. Finally, we will develop a plan for the further translation of our discoveries, ideally by foundation of a new spin-off company following successful completion of the ONCO-SPLICE project.
Projet ERC : SPEARS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Flit Sport — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 0.0 €

In any learning situation, be it math education, language learning or sport training, different learners have different abilities, motivations and capacities at any given time. Thus, an optimal learning can only be achieved with personalized training solutions, dynamically adapted to each learner’s cognitive and/or physical states. The scientific literature showed that such states could be estimated from Cardiac Signals (CS). In ERC PoC SPEARS, we thus propose to redefine consumer training apps, by enabling them to propose personalized and adaptive training plans according to an estimation of their users’ cognitive and/or physical states from their CS measured with consumer grade sensors, e.g., smartwatches. The outcome of ERC project BrainConquest should enable us to tackle this challenge. Indeed, in BrainConquest we explored such a personalized training approach for users of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI). In doing so, we developed Machine Learning (ML) and Signal Processing (SP) algorithms to estimate users’ mental states and predict their upcoming performances from their brain and physiological signals, including CS. In SPEARS, we thus aim at adapting, improving and assessing BrainConquest ML & SP algorithms, initially designed for BCI performance prediction from research grade brain and CS sensors in the lab, to predict cognitive and physical performance from consumer grade CS sensors in the wild. Such algorithms could be used for adaptive training apps in education, cognitive training for healthy aging or sport training. We will then explore a commercial application of this technology for sport training in particular, in collaboration with the startup Flit Sport, which sells an app for providing personalized training exercises for endurance sport athletes, based on their past performances and ML. By integrating our CS-based prediction into Flit Sport training app, we should design optimally personalized training solutions for millions of runners worldwide.