Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : Nano-imaging (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Centre for Cooperative Research in Biomaterials — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

NANO-IMAGING proposes the elucidation of the potential of a metal-protein hybrid nanostructure as a platform for the development of tissue-specific positive Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) contrast agents. This proposal builds on the large demand for MRI examinations worldwide, the health concerns raised by available contrast agents, and the little choice of tissue-specific contrast agents available to clinical practitioners.  The unique value proposition of NANO-IMAGING —a safe, bright, and tissue-specific MRI contrast agent— is possible due to the purposely designed structure and composition of the nanostructure and tissue-targeting properties thereof.  The proposed solution, based on proprietary technology, allows for the control of the nanomaterial properties and the straightforward customization of targeting moieties. Having observed the basic principles of the technology; formulated the concept behind the idea; and made in-vitro experiments that prove the consistency of our revolutionary approach, now we want to further the technology towards the clinical practice by testing the technology in-vivo.  By leveraging on the platform nature of this solution and our capacity to tune the targeting properties of the nanostructure, we aim at providing a simple, tuneable, and affordable development platform for the fabrication of biocompatible, tissue-specific MRI contrast agents à la carte. Therefore, the successful outcome of this project will help realize the breakthrough and innovation potential of this solution for the fast and cost-effective development of a growing portfolio of tissue-specific MRI contrast agents. And thereby address a current societal challenge in health by satisfying the present demand for efficient, safe, and tissue-specific contrast agents for diagnosis
Projet ERC : NANOBITER (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : VIB
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

In non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), approximately 80% of patients have a poor response or develop resistance to current immunotherapies (IT), highlighting a critical need for more effective treatments. To date, most ITs focus on targeting cancer or immune cells, often overlooking endothelial cells (ECs), the body's largest organ. In the running ERC Adv Grant project MystIMEC (#101055155), we demonstrated the immunosuppressive nature of tumor ECs and their pathobiological role in tumor progression. With up to 90% of new drug candidates failing in clinical trials, often due to suboptimal target selection, the host lab has taken a fundamentally different approach to discovering novel therapeutic targets. Leveraging cutting-edge in-house developed AI and gene prioritization tools together with EC-selective lipid nanoparticle-based genetic silencing in a mouse lung tumor model, we discovered and validated 26 previously unexplored immunosuppressive genes (with poor functional annotation, ca 1/3 of human coding genome) as candidate therapeutic targets specific to ECs: silencing these genes promotes anti-tumor immune responses and reduces tumor growth. This ERC-PoC proposal builds further on these findings, aiming to develop nanobody (Nb) therapeutics for three promising targets with the greatest therapeutic efficacy. These targets are either secreted or membrane-exposed and therefore amenable to Nb-based inhibition, a treatment modality successfully used in the clinic. The results will provide the first Proof-of-Concept that our visionary approach to discover and validate unexplored immunosuppressive genes is an efficient, innovative, game-changing strategy. After generating Nbs, we will screen for the top two candidates with the strongest neutralizing effects in vitro (amongst other criteria). Finally, as Proof-of-Concept, the two selected Nbs will be validated in an in vivo lung tumor model for their efficacy to enhance anti-tumor immunity and to reduce tumor growth.
Projet ERC : LNP-DECODE (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : VIB
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The recent success of ionizable lipid nanoparticles (iLNPs) as vehicles for mRNA (mRNA-iLNP) as a safe and highly effective vaccine in the protection against SARS-CoV-2 pushed the lipid nanoparticle technology to the forefront of medicine and launched worldwide interest in their potential as a therapeutic vaccine against numerous pathogens or tumor antigens. Still, their mode of action remains largely a black box. One of the most remarkable properties of mRNA-LNPs is that they do not require any additional adjuvant, explaining for a large part their success. Current belief poses that their adjuvant activity originates from the ionizable lipids without any need for mRNA components. Our data challenge this belief as we found that empty, non-mRNA containing LNPs induce homeostatic, not immunogenic dendritic cell (DC) maturation. This observation has far-stretching clinical implications as it suggests that if one finds a reliable manner to incorporate antigens in a non-immunogenic fashion in LNPs, i.e. as peptides or non-immunogenic mRNA molecules, we can broaden the scope of LNPs from inducers of protective immunity to inducers of tolerance. The current project aims to explore this idea by testing the induction of tolerance against allergens and auto-immune antigens incorporated as peptide cargo within LNPs. In addition, we developed a unique toolbox with a set of biomarkers that distinguish tolerogenic from immunogenic mature DCs. In the current project, we want to validate whether we can use these biomarkers to monitor in vivo the effect of different types of LNPs on DCs and predict their capability to induce tolerance or immunity. We believe that these findings will be highly valuable to help rational design of the future generation of LNPs, guarantee a safer use in the clinic and potentially broaden their scope to inducers of tolerance.
Projet ERC : MICROSENS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Conseil national de la recherche — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNR
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The MICROSENS POC proposal aims to realize a novel naked-eye assay to detect Paraquat (PQ), a harmful pesticide, that has been banned in Europe since 2007, but is still employed in many countries, endangering health and the environment globally. PQ is present at very low concentrations and, hence, there is an urgent need for sensors with high detection capability. To this end, building on the knowledge gained during the PI’s recent ERC grant, we will exploit the thermoresponsivity of microgels combined with plasmonic nanoparticles integrated in a microfluidic device, to improve current detection limits. Our sensing platform will be realised in a portable format, to provide a simple, ready-to-use and cheap test, with a response visible to the naked-eye, as in a simple COVID test, that will be designed to enhance detection capability, production time and costs. The resulting platform will therefore be an important tool for environmental and health surveillance that can also be made available to common people, such as farmers and people living in rural areas. Moreover, it will be based on a simple scheme that, in principle, can be easily extended to the detection of other water contaminants, making this proposal highly promising for future industrial actions with direct relevance to society.

Mots-clés : microgels,nanoparticles,sensors
Projet ERC : XMem (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Conseil national de la recherche — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNR
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 116000.0 €

Silicon is the key building block of transistors, the workhorse of modern electronics. Since the early 2000s, scaling down the transistors’ size according to Moore’s Law to increase clock speed, decrease energy requirements and enhance compactness has been progressively more challenging than it had been for the previous 40 years. Reducing silicon at the two-dimensional level is a technological vision to achieve the ultimate shrinking of high-performance electronic devices and gain enough mechanical flexibility to make it integrable in low-power flexible devices. We propose to attain this breakthrough result by stabilizing silicene, an atomically thin silicon layer with a nearly graphene-like structure, by physically protecting both of its faces. Our goal is the scalable production of durable silicene in the form of atomically thin membranes. Standardized production of silicene membranes will be then assessed for integration into high-performance or low-power and flexible transistors with unprecedented outperforming technical advantages (intrinsic channel miniaturization, high carrier mobility, high energy efficiency, large-scale uniformity, high flexibility, and transfer compatibility with secondary substrates) and substantial reduction of the energy consumption. These characteristics make silicene membranes a promising component of a sustainable electronics for massive diffused societal trends like the internet-of-things. The goal of this PoC project is to validate with industrial players the technological feasibility of a prototypal silicene-based transistor, at the same time defining the best IP protection and commercialization route.
Projet ERC : iReach (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Italian Institute of Technology — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Visual impairments are disastrous for infants. They affect the infants’ reaching and motor skills, space perception, playing, socializing, physical functioning, psychological well-being, and health service needs. Therefore, early therapeutic interventions aimed explicitly at fostering these abilities are needed to improve the quality of life of people with visual disabilities. Effective rehabilitation technologies to enhance visually impaired infants' skills depend critically on a better understanding of the neuroscientific bases of multisensory and body processing. However, to date, these abilities can only be assessed qualitatively based on observational approaches. Due to the complexity of conveying a signal to visually-impaired infants that they will assuredly understand, technological solutions providing a quantitative output for visually-impaired infants are unavailable. With iReach, we aim to solve this problem. Specifically, we will design, develop and propose for commercialization a multisensory system that will provide non-invasive recording and training of the sensory-motor skills in visually-impaired infants. It will be compatible with simultaneous measures of behavioral and brain activity responses (e.g., electroencephalography). This technology will be designed based on realizing four concomitant tasks: (1) development of a novel rehabilitation technology conveying multisensory and bodily stimulation; (2) development of a quantitative method that will train and measure visually-impaired infants’ sensory-motor responses; (3) development of sensory-motor paradigms providing the audio and tactile spatial stimulations associated with body movements; (4) dedicated pipelines to analyze infants’ response to multisensory stimulations and with regard to body position. For the first time, the product resulting from iReach will train and directly quantify visually-impaired infants' sensory-motor abilities, offering a cost-efficient system for early intervention.
Projet ERC : CONDINKS (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Italian Institute of Technology — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Transparent conductive oxides (TCOs) inks combine high transparency in the visible and high electrical conductivity with the benefits of solution processing for printable electronics. The most promising TCO, Sn:In2O3 (ITO), is currently being replaced on the transparent conductive inks market due to supply risk of ITO. Alternatives range from silver flakes, to copper pastes, or graphene and other carbon based materials. However, the remarkable environmental stability, chemical tunability, and optoelectronic properties of TCOs remain unbeaten. Hence, it is time to invest into good alternative TCO inks from non-critical raw materials. In CONDINKS, we have identified some of the major issue, limiting the performance of TCO nanocrystals in conductive inks related to 1) their electronic structure and depletion layer formation and (2) dopant segregation. Segregated on the surface, dopants might remain inactive and, hence, do not contribute to the conductivity. Segregated in the core might result into large depletion layers. Both effects significantly influence thin film conductivity in particular on the nanoscale. The solution offered by CONDINKS is based on two objectives: 1. Making conductive inks from non-critical raw materials with properties competing with benchmark systems through nanoscale dopant engineering; 2. Upscaling of the produced materials, with first attempts towards reactors in aqueous-based flow synthesis processes. The breakthrough innovation of our product is immediately obvious: similar (or superior) properties to commercially available materials with lower cost and lower supply risk. CONDINKS has put together a team of researchers with industrial support to tackle the high-reaching goal to develop conductive inks based on non-critical raw materials with enhanced performance due to dopant engineering.
Projet ERC : DROPTRACK (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Italian Institute of Technology — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Microfluidics technology targets droplet manipulation by confining fluids to manufacture materials for many industrial applications and life sciences. Data analysis obtained by microfluidic experiments remains a bottleneck to this day due to the lack of a reliable interface converting raw observations to informative data fast enough and at low operating costs. Many computer vision tools exist, which permit to infer useful physical information from video data but they typically target specific physical systems and lack broad applicability. Moreover, the existing tools need intensive development and fine-tuning before they can be useful in a specific scenario. Thus, such a lack of computer vision tools with broad applicability hinders the penetration of this technology for extensive microfluidics applications.  This PoC aims to develop a stand-alone, easy-to-use software (DropTrack) that can detect and track individual droplets from experimental videos. Two cutting-edge deep-learning algorithms, YOLO for droplet detection and DeepSORT for droplet tracking, will be at the software's core. DropTrack will provide trajectories of the individual droplets and measure physical quantities of interest, such as the droplet numbers, flow rates, packing fraction, etc., by analyzing videos from experiments. Our preliminary work indicates that DropTrack is capable of analyzing images much faster than the image capture rate of a typical digital camera, thereby opening entirely new prospects for real-time feedback control in experiments. The realization of DropTrack will lead to dramatic time and resources savings in video data analysis of deformable moving objects in microfluidics. Beyond this PoC, the successful demonstration of this technology in microfluidics is expected to attract significant attention as a handy data analysis tool in other relevant fields such as multi-organism biological systems from cell aggregates to animal congregation.
Projet ERC : MetaCam (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Italian Institute of Technology — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Surveillance cameras are widely used by governments, businesses, and ordinary citizens to monitor private and public areas to deter crime and identify offenders. As of 2021, it was estimated that there are over 1 billion surveillance cameras worldwide.  However, there are great concerns that continuous monitoring severely restricts people's privacy and freedom of movement. There have been reports of abuse of surveillance footage including by businesses and government institutions. Regulators, civil rights groups and citizens are thus rightly concerned about infringements on freedoms of speech and association, especially in this era of AI when monitoring, tracking, and profiling techniques have been made easier, cheaper and more accurate.  An initial step in video scene analysis is pose estimation which enables monitoring the flux of people and detecting criminal actions or intent. Considering the privacy concerns of continuously recording citizens and automated image analysis, this project intends to develop a novel camera system that captures just enough detail required for pose estimation but excludes identifying information. Existing software methods of deidentifying videos require a clear video to be taken first, and so do not entirely solve this problem. Proposed experimental hardware methods that avoid this issue using lenses have bulky optics and a limited set of parameters.  With MetaCam we will implement the optimized optical devices (metalenses) that allow ultimate control of all the light degrees of freedom. In this project, we will design and fabricate the metalenses and build an optical table prototype of the camera to demonstrate its secure privacy-preserving performance. Supported by business developers we will examine the business potential, and map and engage the stakeholders later required to get from a proof- of- concept to a market-ready product.
Projet ERC : AUTISMUS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Italian Institute of Technology — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a condition marked by communication difficulties, but some individuals with ASD excel in understanding and responding to music. Joint musical activities have shown promise in improving social behavior among people with ASD. However, existing music-based interventions have limitations: they lack precise control, flexibility, and accessibility, often requiring training or therapist presence. To address these issues, the AUTISMUS project aims to create technology that allows ASD individuals to easily access engaging and interactive musical activities, even from home. This project leverages a pillar of my ERC StG – the eMusic Box (eMB) – a device developed to enable non-musicians to make music together, mutually adapting to each other’s performance. We will assess if individuals with ASD can use the eMB effectively and whether it enhances their social functioning. If successful, we plan to bring this technology to market, considering insights from end-users. The eMB's impact spans various stakeholders, including individuals with ASD, caregivers, educational institutions, healthcare professionals, therapy centers, research organizations, and autism support groups. Its versatility suits ASD individuals of different ages and abilities. Compared to existing technologies, the eMB offers superior accessibility, flexibility, and interactivity. Our exploitation route involves patenting the technology and licensing it to a market leader for broad distribution to both B2B and B2C customers, fostering innovation and enhancing global products and services.
Projet ERC : VSoft Pro (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Italian Institute of Technology — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 83000.0 €

Losing a limb can profoundly impact a person's physical, emotional, and social well-being. While current upper limb prostheses restore users' basic motor capabilities, they fall short of replicating the natural appearance and functionality of a human limb. The innate compliance and controllable stiffness of the human musculoskeletal system allow individuals to adapt seamlessly to various tasks and environments. Intuitively, prostheses with user-controllable stiffness could mimic this behaviour, promoting safe and natural interactions. However, current upper limb prostheses feature rigid actuation, which limits their versatility. Within the “VSoft Pro” ERC Proof of Concept project, we propose to develop a transhumeral upper limb prosthesis featuring user-controllable stiffness and passive adaptability. The developed prostheses leverage soft robotics principles to closely replicate the morphology and functionality of a human limb, paving the way to a more natural limb restoration experience that could augment users’ acceptance rate. The project will also focus on the development of intuitive control, empowering users to manage their bionic limb as an extension of their own body. Preliminary investigations aim to assess users’ needs to tailor the design of prosthetic devices to their preferences. Further goal of this research is to evaluate the advantages of voluntary stiffness control over classical rigid prostheses during functional tasks and activities of daily living, informing the development of future advanced prosthetic solutions. Finally, the Proof of Concept project will be focused on building a clinically viable prototype, and demonstrating its application in relevant scenarios.
Projet ERC : 2Dchiral (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Italian Institute of Technology — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Molecular chirality plays a fundamental role in pharmaceuticals, toxicology, and environmental sciences, as enantiomers of the same molecule can have vastly different biological effects. Current chiroptical detection methods, such as circular dichroism and Raman optical activity, require complex, expensive setups with limited sensitivity, often making real-time and field applications impractical. The 2Dchiral project aims to revolutionize chiral detection by leveraging the colossal optical anisotropy of novel 2D materials to create fiber-based chiroptical probes. These functionalized optical fibers will replace bulky polarization optics, improving compactness and portability together with enhancing detection sensitivity by over 10X while reducing costs by 2 – 5X.  Our approach is based on the principle that chiral interactions can be significantly amplified if the illuminating light’s polarization state is tailored to match the symmetry of the target molecule. Instead of using conventional circularly polarized light, we will design custom polarization states via 2D-material-integrated optical fiber probes, ensuring optimal enantiomer-specific signal enhancement. This will enable fast, real-time enantiomeric discrimination in pharmaceuticals, environmental monitoring, and food safety.  The potential impact is significant: improved enantioselective drug screening, detection of chiral pollutants, and real-time quality control in food and chemical industries. Through IP protection, commercialization strategies, and industry engagement, 2Dchiral aims to establish a new standard for low-cost, high-precision chiral analysis, democratizing access to advanced optical sensing worldwide.