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

High-resolution automatic weather monitoring system east of Dakar (DakE) will probe the internal structure and dynamics of tropical mesoscale convective systems (MCS) and design a novel methodology for flood and storm early warning.
Projet ERC : LF-LB (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Tel Aviv — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TAU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

We will develop and commercialize an innovative device for diagnosis and monitoring of cancer in liquid biopsies based on a label-free interferometric phase microscopy (IPM) unit, coupled with dedicated real-time artificial intelligence (AI) for cell classification. This device will materialize an innovative approach for the much-anticipated imaging flow cytometry, dramatically decreasing its costs, and improving patient care by accurate monitoring of cancer in the clinical lab from a simple lab test (liquid biopsy). The success of the project is dependent on four high-risk/high-gain aspects: (a) Building the first clinical IPM device. (b) Designing and manufacturing a disposable microfluidic device for imaging flow cytometry. (c) Obtaining high-enough acquisition and processing throughput in imaging flow cytometry of urine samples. (d) Training a deep natural network to detect cancer cells based on the information-deep label-free IPM images of cancer cells during flow. The proposed PoC project stems from my on-going ERC StG project that focuses on the application of IPM for grading the metastatic potential of cancer cells, as a basic-science research tool.
Projet ERC : TopoTapered (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Institut Weizmann — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : WIS
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Quantum computers will revolutionize multiple technology fields which will have a massive impact on society, in areas such as communication, healthcare, machine learning & artificial intelligence, finance, materials research and development and aerospace designing. Currently, the commercialization of quantum computers for real life applications is still a long shot due to major technical challenges like decoherence, a process in which the environment interacts with quantum bits and changes their quantum behavior causing computing errors. Topological quantum computer platforms offer an alternative route where the topological nature of quantum bits protects them from decoherence, therefore not needing error correction protocols that constraint development of commercial quantum computing systems. These mainly rely on Majorana zero modes, which are topological boundary modes predicted to be decoupled from decoherence. Topological computation is achieved by braiding of Majorana zero modes, but their manipulation is still an experimental challenge. The TopoTapered project aims to develop tapered nanowires and tapered nanowire networks as a scalable technology for auto-tuning, transportation and braiding of Majorana zero modes bound at ends of topological superconducting segments. The innovative tapered nanowire platform for quantum computers will support topologically protected quantum bits making it possible to incorporate the large number of them needed for processing quantum information in quantum computers. Hence, TopoTapered will develop a simplified quantum computer architecture which will be both robust and scalable and therefore will shorten the time to market for quantum computers. Furthermore, to ensure the successful commercialization of our innovation, we will identify our product position in the quantum computing value chain and define the most suitable commercialization plan to establish a sustainable business model for TopoTapered.
Projet ERC : CrystalCellFactory (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Institut Weizmann — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : WIS
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The superior optical properties and stability of Titanium dioxide (TiO2) has made the material attractive to many industries, for use in food, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. Despite these benefits, the wide use of TiO2 has raised significant health concerns, culminating in the 2022 European Union's decision to ban its use as a food additive. This regulatory shift has precipitated an urgent demand for healthier, environmentally sustainable alternatives that do not compromise on performance. Unfortunately, current alternatives fail to match TiO2 in terms of efficacy and stability, thereby limiting their adoption. This PoC, proposes an innovative solution by which yeast serve as eco-friendly "biofactories" to produce guanine crystals. These crystals, which are naturally utilized by animals to reflect light, possess remarkable optical properties, with enhanced thermostability, and superior compatibility compared to current TiO2 alternatives. We will modify yeast to express the specialized highly efficient guanine-producing enzymes, originally identified in zebrafish as part of our ERC project. Inspired by nature, our project will exploit yeast's remarkable biosynthetic abilities to obtain efficient production of these crystals. Our preliminary results demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, and are backed by robust metabolomic profiling that enables precise measurement of guanine levels, identification of metabolic bottlenecks, and detection of by-products. In preparation for commercial rollout, our strategy involves mapping our innovation within the EU food industry, identifying precise market segments, and crafting an initial business model. This multifaceted approach is designed to both showcase the economic viability and market potential of our yeast-produced guanine crystals and also to position them as a safe, sustainable, and high-performing TiO2 alternative, in line with the EU's health-centric regulatory framework and consumer expectations.
Projet ERC : CryoQMetrology (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Institut Weizmann — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : WIS
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Quantum computing holds the potential to highly impact our society and revolutionize scientific research, healthcare, finance, and beyond. As the complexity of quantum circuits increases, advanced tools for nanoscale metrology of the sources of decoherence and energy loss will become vital for large scale fabrication, inspection, and optimization of quantum devices and microcircuits. The main obstacle is that in contrast to classical computation, solid state quantum devices operate at sub-Kelvin temperatures at which the currently available microelectronics metrology and thermal imaging techniques are inoperable.  In our ERC AdG project, we have developed a groundbreaking technique that provides for the first time cryogenic thermal imaging down to mK temperatures, with four orders of magnitude improvement in thermal sensitivity over the state-of-the-art room-temperature methods. Based on superconducting quantum interference device on the apex of a sharp tip (SOT), it allows nanoscale imaging of the minute heating and energy loss arising from electron scattering off single atomic defects, that can provide the crucial metrology of the decoherence sources in quantum devices. Moreover, the SOT delivers simultaneous imaging of the electrical currents flowing in superconducting circuits, essential for inspection and optimization of superconducting qubits.  This PoC project is aimed at adaptation of the SOT lab technology to industrial metrology applications, including development of reproducible industrially-compatible device fabrication methods, boosting their environmental durability, enhancing the SOT functionalities, and development of sustainable characterization methods. We will develop IPR strategy, explore establishment of industrial partnerships, and promote integration of the SOT sensors into existing industrial workflows, to deliver a precise metrology solution to advance quantum computing development and enhance the competitiveness of the European industry.
Projet ERC : EchoYieldEstimation (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Tel Aviv — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TAU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

With the rapidly growing world population, accelerated climate changes and global migration, nutritional security is a major challenge. This situation calls for fast development and utilisation of agricultural technology that will push agricultural yield production to its full potential. Yield estimation in agricultural production is thus central for both agricultural planning as well as for successful agroeconomic management. Despite its importance, agricultural yield estimation is currently almost solely done manually without assisting technology and it is therefore inaccurate and limited to small areas. To meet this challenge, we offer a unique sonar sensing system for large-scale, rapid yield estimation. Our technology, as demonstrated in a recent peer reviewed paper, and in additional preliminary studies has unexampled advantages compared to other sensors. The sonar-based crop estimating sensor has been patented and initial tests show that it is capable of estimating pepper and tomato yields with ~90% accuracy under laboratory conditions. The technology has several advantages over pursued optical based solutions including the ability to penetrate the vegetation and its functionality under all lighting conditions. In the proposed project, we will expand those tests to additional key vegetables, e.g., cucumbers, and elaborate our approach to make it functional under field conditions, aiming to provide farmers with a reliable tool for crop estimation. Our team is composed of sonar, agriculture, robotics and business experts, covering all of the needs of the project. We will collaborate with agri-robotics companies and agricultural stake-holders in the EU to fulfil the goals of our PoC project. The project will ultimately lead to the necessary steps for establishing a spin-off company that will exploit this invention and provide a product to the benefit of European and worldwide farmers.
Projet ERC : BioBone (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Tel Aviv — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TAU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 120000.0 €

Osteosarcoma and Ewing sarcoma are the most common types of cancer in patients younger than 30 years. The gold standard treatment is bone tumor resection followed by reconstruction of the tissue, thereby allowing the salvage of the limb. Titanium and its alloys are mostly used in such orthopedic surgeries due to their biocompatibility and excellent mechanical properties. A novel, cutting-edge technology of patient-specific implants, 3-dimensional (3D) printed porous titanium implants, was recently introduced to clinical use. Yet, even several years after surgery, the resected section is not fully reconstructed, leading to further medical complications often requiring re-operations. A promising solution is the combination of titanium porous implants with bioactive scaffolds to support bone regeneration following tumor resection. Here, we aim to fabricate a 3D-printed porous titanium implant incorporated with patent-protected bioactive materials we have developed in the scope of the PersonalBone ERC-StG project to provide an optimal microenvironment for stimulating bone regeneration following bone tumor resection. For this purpose, we will optimize the formulation as well as the method of incorporation into 3D-printed titanium implants. The incorporated implants will be tested for biocompatibility and osteointegration in critical-size bone defect models in vivo. As we recently demonstrated for the novel materials, we will examine several success criteria, which will be refined according to input from orthopedic oncology surgeons who routinely perform tumor resections. This novel technology is envisioned to significantly advance the current treatments offered following bone resection, thereby considerably reducing the risk of further complications and offering a major improvement in the quality of life of patients recovering from bone cancer.
Projet ERC : CircaSCOPE (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Institut Weizmann — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : WIS
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Circadian clocks carry an immense importance to human health, as clock disruption is related to various malignancies from sleep disorders through diabetes to cancer. Furthermore, many drug targets are influenced by circadian clocks. In order to maximize drug’s efficacy while minimizing side effects, it is necessary to consider the drug’s time-of-administration, also known as “chronotherapy”. These revelations are critical for drug administration and development. However, their practical implementation is tempered by the lack of suitable research tools that bridge the gap from the bench to the clinic. The time-dependent effect of an intervention on the clock is represented by the Phase Transition Curve (PTC). PTCs retrieval is laborious and challenging, consequently they were mostly overlooked in the pharmaceutical R&D process. In the ERC Project CIRCOMMUNICATION, we studied clock-resetting mechanisms, which led to the development of CircaSCOPE, an efficient high-throughput methodology for high-resolution PTC construction. CircaSCOPE can be used as a powerful screening method for clock-modulating drugs, either for the purpose of targeting pathologies associated with circadian disruption, or to identify drugs which elicit unwanted side-effects on the clock. ¬Once fully developed and systematically integrated in chrono-medicine, CircaSCOPE has the potential to improve drug discovery and yield medicines with better therapeutic index. Here, we detail our plan for the first steps toward commercializing of our innovation. We will demonstrate the applicability of this approach through drug libraries screens and expand the repertoire of cell types that the system relies on. In addition, we will explore different commercialization strategies and interact with potential stakeholders and end-users. Given the medical importance of circadian effects, we’d envisage that CircaSCOPE will become as a gold-standard procedure in future drugs development.
Projet ERC : LemnaTap (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Institut Weizmann — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : WIS
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Natural pigments are gaining importance in the EU as safer and more sustainable alternatives to synthetic colorants, but their use also presents challenges which have been hindering their wide adoption in the colorants market, particularly in terms of scalability, cost, and ethical sourcing. Carminic acid is widely used as a natural alternative and exemplifies these production challenges: it requires a labour-intensive extraction process, has negative ethical and environmental impacts for insect cultivation and exploitation, and its production is unpredictable due to external factors like weather fluctuations. Our PoC project introduces a groundbreaking technology for the sustainable production of target metabolites like Carminic acid. We aim to demonstrate the feasibility of using our innovative technology to produce cheaper and more sustainable natural colorants and to develop a comprehensive Business Plan to ensure the technology's market readiness and sustainability. Furthermore, we will conduct thorough market analysis and industry discussions to test our business case with relevant stakeholders, while also identifying potential funding sources to support future commercialization efforts.
Projet ERC : PromPrint (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université du Sussex — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : US
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1476014.0 €

PROMPRINT will uncover and analyze the rejects of legal deposit: the printed texts excluded from the ostensibly universal archive promised by copyright libraries. Legal deposit works to preserve every text published in a specific group of libraries. While this principle is egalitarian, the cultural promiscuity of print has often troubled the prestigious deposit libraries, as deposit brings such historically controversial forms as novels, children’s books, almanacs, and pamphlets into elite collections. The project asks: (1) Which textual forms and genres do deposit libraries reject? How and why does this change over time? (2) How can digital tools and quantitative analyses help to map absences and gaps in deposit collections? (3) What are the best models for using these tools and analyses in relation to particular texts and types of texts, as in the examples of obscene books, colonial texts, and children’s literature? (4) How does the process of putting together local and centralized records to uncover deposit rejects lead to generalizable methodologies for finding texts absent from other archives and collections? (5) What does a focus on rejection, relegation, and negative bibliography (the study of gaps in the bibliographical record) add to book history, including current debates over digitization? The project answers these questions by focusing on a particular case study: deposit in the nineteenth-century United Kingdom. In this period, an unprecedented increase in the production of printed texts led to high pressure on the deposit system at the same time that cultural interest in deposit as a system for knowledge preservation grew. Beyond the case study, though, the project will drive forward wider understandings of how literature is canonized and forgotten, collected and destroyed.

Mots-clés : legal deposit of books,libraries,literary canon,nineteenth century literature
Projet ERC : PiCo (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
Entité participante : Université de Manchester — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1634640.0 €

Despite the observational successes of the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) cosmological model, a number of its key ingredients remain unknown. Imminent surveys promise to yield unprecedented constraints on these components, thus making precision tests of ΛCDM a first-time reality. In PiCo, my team and I will focus on two fundamental questions in modern physics that can only be answered through cosmological observations: What mechanism gave rise to the primordial fluctuations seeding all the structures seen in the Universe today? What is the cause for the Universe’s late-time accelerated expansion? We will address these by developing novel analysis techniques built on the complementarity of cosmological probes and advanced statistical methods. These are designed to harness the rich information contained in non-Gaussian, small-scale features of cosmic fields, while enabling precise constraints on ΛCDM, robust to systematic uncertainties dominating high-precision data. Focusing on two of the most powerful probes of the next decade, galaxy clustering and galaxy clusters, we will constrain the mechanisms driving the accelerated expansion through the first joint simulation-based inference analysis of galaxy clusters selected through the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and weak lensing. In addition, we will derive constraints on primordial fluctuations in a combined analysis of galaxy clustering and CMB lensing angular two- and three-point statistics. Capitalizing on my past work, we will develop these methods using simulations and current data, before applying them to galaxy data from the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time and CMB data from the Simons Observatory, two upcoming high-precision experiments I am deeply involved in. PiCo will deliver tight constraints on the key ingredients of ΛCDM and will thus contribute to understanding if this model provides a complete description of our Universe, or if it is time for a paradigm shift in cosmology.

Mots-clés : weak lensing,galaxy clusters,galaxy clustering,forward modeling,simulation based inference
Projet ERC : RiboHetMet (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative B iology : from Genes and Genomes to S ystems
Entité participante : Université de Tel Aviv — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TAU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Protein translation, considered a mere reflection of transcription, emerges as a regulatory hub, shaping proteomes and directing cellular outcomes. This is due to existence of heterogeneous ribosome populations, yielding specialized ribosomes that drive context-dependent translation. While technological advances enable mapping of ribosomal diversity, questions remain as to the prevalence of the phenomenon and the mechanisms by which specialized ribosomes confer specific functions. Studies propose the presence of onco-ribosomes promoting oncogenic translational programs and regulating disease-related functions. Metastasis, the deadly spread of cancer cells to remote organs, is a key process that relies on rewiring of gene expression networks. Accordingly, our work shows that changes in the expression of coding and non-coding genes affect metastatic potential and correlates with patient prognosis. We further show that environmentally-regulated RNA modifications add to ribosomal heterogeneity. Yet, the involvement of specialized ribosomes in metastasis development is mostly unknown. Here, I propose to map ribosomal heterogeneity in metastatic cancers and decipher the 'ribosomal code' empowering specialized ribosomes to promote oncogenic translational programs and drive metastasis. Using cell lines, animal models and patient-derived samples, we will chart metastatic patterns of rRNA and ribosomal proteins (RPs), as well as of snoRNAs and rRNA modifications they guide. Employing in vivo and in vitro assays, we will uncover individual RPs and snoRNAs influencing ribosomal functions and metastasis formation and investigate their mechanisms of action. These genes and their metastatic patterns along with metastasis-specific rRNA compositions may serve as cancer biomarkers and targets for therapy. This research will advance our understanding of molecular mechanisms underlying ribosome heterogeneity and elucidate involvement of specialized ribosomes in cancer progression.

Mots-clés : epitranscriptomics ribosomes ribosome heterogeneity pseudouridylation 2 o methylation n4 acetylcitidine snorna rna modification cancer metastasis