Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : SPARCL (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and I mmunotherapy
Entité participante : Leiden University Medical Center — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LUMC
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499894.0 €

Parasitic diseases cause considerable morbidity and mortality in poverty-stricken areas, affecting hundreds of millions of lives globally. Vaccines are urgently needed to alleviate disease and lift the economic consequences. Plasmodium falciparum malaria, Schistosoma mansoni and Necator americanus hookworms are together responsible for the greatest burden of disease. Vaccination with attenuated parasites is an efficacious strategy in inducing immunity to parasites in animal models. Recently, we have translated attenuated parasite vaccination to humans in proof-of-concept clinical trials in which we protected subsets of individuals from challenge. This unique preliminary data indicates a role for the skin as a prime immunological organ. Based on these findings, I propose to create a next generation highly immunogenic, adjuvanted whole parasite vaccines, ready for pre-clinical testing. We will build on our previous experience with chemical tools to load whole parasites with adjuvants. To measure the potency of the new vaccines, we aim to measure early skin-based humoral and cellular immune markers which correlate with protection in our samples from prior and novel controlled human infection models. We will assess the functionality of antibodies by adapting our current molecular imaging tools to quantitatively analyze movement kinematics of parasites in representative 3D environments resembling the human skin. Cellular correlates of protection in skin will be mapped using imaging mass cytometry on freshly obtained skin biopsies from experimentally infected volunteers. Through combined, parallel analysis of circulating immune markers by high-dimensional flow cytometry, we aim to take a comprehensive approach including local and circulating markers to identify protective immune responses. This high-risk high-gain proposal is aimed to break the impasse in the field of parasite vaccine development and open a novel out-of-the-box avenue to fill the vaccine pipeline.

Mots-clés : controlled human infection,parasitology,parasite host interaction,plasmodium falciparum malaria,schistosoma mansoni,necator americanus hookworm
Projet ERC : HUE (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Académie autrichienne des sciences — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ÖAW
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2374358.75 €

The ancient world was fascinated by color. People processed certain raw materials to use them as pigments. Their material qualities and provenance mattered. Yet little is known about where these materials came from: some might have been broadly available, others rare and traded far. Along the way from resource to artwork much is still unknown. A plethora of mineral pigments was used in the past; materials were processed ranging from powdered cinnabar to pyrotechnological multi-component materials. They came together to color walls and sculpture alike and now enable the understanding of interaction across production technologies, trade networks and cultural relations in a new way. So far, identifying the provenance of pigments relies on metal reference. But metals and pigments are not the same. It is thus essential to develop a pigment-specific reference database paired with a proper toolset to push this new avenue in archaeological science to its full potential. Among other pigments, Egyptian blue serves as a cornerstone indicator of cross-craft interaction between metal- and glass work – HUE probes material provenance and production technology by looking at the Mediterranean from the Bronze Age to the Roman period until the 1st century BC-AD, a time of great political reorganization and significant change in the organization of pigment production. HUE analyzes raw and processed pigments from original artifacts, workshops and trade nodes to bridge the gap from resource, market and workshop to art. The results are not only relevant for polychromy research, but also for an archaeological evaluation of workshops, discussion of market- and trade network theories and people-environment interaction. The PI has already shown the significance of this approach in pilot studies. Supported by a network of international specialists, new light will shine on ancient pigments to reveal the cultural significance of color in economic and technological developments.

Mots-clés : ancient polychromy archaeometry material provenance production technology cross craft interaction production workshops organization of production and trade trade networks human environment interaction
Projet ERC : EditYR (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Institut de Chimie — Pays : Slovénie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1599500.0 €

Gene therapies aim to cure genetic diseases by modifying the DNA blueprint. An ideal gene therapy should be durable, safe, and efficient, which often requires integration of large therapeutic DNA cargo at precise genomic locations. Advanced DNA editors with programmable specificities, such as the CRISPR technology, are limited by the nuclease-based mechanism and poor efficiency of large DNA insertions. Increased efficiency, specificity and precision of large edits are required to address a broad therapeutic space. Tyrosine recombinases (YRs) efficiently rearrange large DNA segments without the pitfalls of nuclease-based editors, but with an important caveat – rational reprogramming of their specificities for binding non-native DNA targets is an unsolved problem. EditYR ambitiously aims to develop a rationally programmable tyrosine recombinase platform for efficient integration of large DNA cargo into precise genomic locations. EditYR will expand recombinase engineering capabilities by exploiting the recent advances in large scale DNA synthesis and sequencing coupled with bioinformatics and innovative protein design. Objective 1 will engineer tyrosine recombinase DNA specificities and extract a comprehensive DNA recognition code. Objective 2 will modify their oligomerization properties to enable binding non-palindromic targets, allowing targeting any desired nucleotide sequence. Objective 3 will investigate requirements for irreversible recombination to maximize integration efficiencies and unlock the full therapeutic potential of these enzymes. Finally, Objective 4 will validate engineered enzymes by identification of targetable sequences in therapeutically relevant genomic regions and integration of therapeutic DNA cargo in various human cell types for different disease cases.EditYR will establish tyrosine recombinases as advanced tools for genome editing, creating a DNA editing technology that will elevate the capabilities of gene therapies to unprecedented levels

Mots-clés : site specific recombinases,tyrosine recombinases,protein engineering,high throughput library screening,genomic sage harbors
Projet ERC : Saphyr (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
Entité participante : Université Paris Cité — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UP Cité
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1234032.0 €

The study of ecological systems is at the forefront of modern scientific research, fueled by the vast availability of empirical data and advanced bioengineering techniques. Unraveling the dynamical and thermodynamical properties of these complex systems, especially in light of the current biodiversity crisis, represents a major challenge. SAPHYR aims to decode the complexity of large microbial communities and characterize their alternative dynamical states, with a particular focus on the gut microbiome, which plays a key role in various health disorders. Methodologically, SAPHYR is structured around three main axes. First, by applying cutting-edge statistical physics techniques, it aims to identify and correlate stable/unstable regimes with healthy/unhealthy physiological states in the gut (Axis 1), ultimately pinpointing universal features. Next, it will explore spatial correlations (Axis 2) and structured, time-dependent interaction networks (Axis 3). This approach will allow for an in-depth investigation of out-of-equilibrium dynamics and pattern formation within spatially extended communities. The study of sound mathematical models, combining methods from disordered-system physics with numerical simulations, will offer unprecedented insights into the stability of these systems under external disturbances. SAPHYR represents a paradigm shift in our understanding of systems governed by highly heterogeneous interaction networks, offering a timely compound of theoretical physics with applied research. On one front, SAPHYR will distinguish between single and multiple-fixed-point regimes, examine the interplay between local and global dynamics, and disentangle informative variation (signal) in microbial composition from noise. On the other, it will lay the groundwork for identifying correlations between microbiota-host interactions and bowel diseases, contributing tools for developing targeted health management strategies.

Mots-clés : disordered systems spin glass models replica and cavity methods dynamical mean field theory generalized lotka volterra model gastrointestinal diseases
Projet ERC : TERES (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : Forschungsverbund Berlin — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : FVB
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2492679.0 €

Many processes in nature and industry are intricately linked to the structure-function relationship of molecules, which optical stimuli can profoundly alter. Chemists and physicists have long sought to unravel the ultrafast structural changes of photochemical reactions. Using two short pulses with precisely synchronized time delays, a series of snapshots of the evolving electronic and molecular structures at various reaction times can be collected, analogous to assembling frames in a video. Measuring coupled electronic-nuclear dynamics remains a formidable challenge due to the small time, energy and spatial scales involved. State-of-the-art ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) techniques excel in molecular structure retrieval, but the critical signatures stemming from simultaneous transformations in electronic structure remain elusive, as several molecular reaction channels overlap and cannot be separated with current imaging technologies.  My goal is to pioneer a novel time- and energy-resolved electron scattering (TERES) method for real-time monitoring of coupled electronic-nuclear dynamics in photochemical reactions by energy-resolving UED. TERES will experimentally separate and identify electron scattering signals arising from different electronic structures of excited molecules (e.g., in different excited states) while preserving molecular structure information, comprehensively mapping the potential energy surfaces involved at different reaction times – capabilities significantly exceeding current UED technology. Successful realization of TERES promises to usher in a new era in photochemistry, unveiling hidden aspects of chemical reactivity.

Mots-clés : ultrafast electron diffraction,femtochemistry,ultrafast molecular dynamics,electron energy loss spectroscopy,femtosecond photochemistry,chemical reactions,ultrafast electron scattering
Projet ERC : OceanPeak (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Alfred-Wegener-Institut Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : AWI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499953.75 €

Atmospheric CO2 levels are 49% above preindustrial levels due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The ocean takes up ~25% of these emissions and thereby mitigates climate change. The Global Carbon Budget annually quantifies the atmospheric CO2 sources (emissions) and sinks (e.g. ocean uptake), and I coordinate its ocean CO2 sink estimate. The uncertainty of the ocean sink estimate is huge: The range of estimates is 2.5 times larger than the CO2 emissions of the EU27. It is unknown whether the ocean sink has grown or stagnated since 2016. And yet, we face an even larger challenge with the imminent transition to a new regime: In the past, the ocean sink was controlled by fast-growing atmospheric CO2. After peak emissions, atmospheric CO2 will grow slower, stagnate or even decrease. I hypothesize that the dynamics of the ocean carbon sink will then be fundamentally different and poorly quantified ocean ventilation processes will be even more important. Ventilation transports carbon to the deep ocean and is the ‘bottleneck’ of the ocean sink. OceanPeak will establish a game-changing forecasting capacity of the truly global ocean CO2 uptake in societally-relevant low-emission scenarios. OceanPeak will go beyond the ‘surface and open ocean’ estimate with a seamless transition to coastal shelves and from surface to depth. With a unique multi-resolution ocean carbon cycle model, I will: 1) develop a seamless coastal shelf to open ocean carbon cycle model and ground-truth ventilation processes based on newly-emerging observations to robustly quantify the ocean carbon sink to date 2) characterize the dynamics of the ocean carbon sink under regimes after peak emissions 3) attribute the evolution of the global ocean carbon sink to processes and quantify the time-scale of carbon sequestration. Quantification and understanding of the ocean sink from coastal to global scales will be paramount for an independent monitoring system of greenhouse gases as foreseen in the Paris Agreement.

Mots-clés : carbon cycle,coastal carbon cycle,emission verification
Projet ERC : VERTEXSO (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Alfred-Wegener-Institut Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : AWI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 763477.75 €

Mitigating global climatic changes due to human influences is of paramount importance in the coming decades. Historically, the global ocean has played a critical role in this process by taking up the majority of the excess heat and about 30% of the anthropogenic carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions from the atmosphere. The largest share of this uptake process occurred through the subduction of waters in the Southern Ocean that sequester heat and carbon in deeper layers of the ocean. Yet, global climate models have their largest biases in this region and difficulties in representing its past climatic changes. Thus, their future projections bear large uncertainties in the potential of the Southern Ocean to continuously provide such a mitigation service. VERTEXSO addresses this challenge by studying vertical transport processes, improving their representation in models, and developing novel methods to continuously monitor the vertical exchange. In order to reach these goals, this project performs simulations with a regional ocean model that is able to directly resolve convective plumes and assesses their impact on vertical carbon exchange. We then scale the insights to a global level by improving parameterisations of vertical processes in an Earth System Model, and by investigating their impacts on global climatic changes. Facilitated by most recent advances in remotely observing the Southern Ocean high latitudes, we explore tracers of convective plumes in subsurface data and integrate these observations with satellite data to assess surface density stratification changes. The latter forms a new measure for vertical exchange that serves as a benchmark for model simulations and a tool to monitor the potential of the Southern Ocean to take up and release CO2 and heat. Through this combination of observational data with multi-scale model simulations, VERTEXSO advances the understanding of vertical exchange in the Southern Ocean and how its changes affect the global climate.

Mots-clés : southern ocean,stratification,convection,carbon,heat,ocean circulation,remote sensing,observations,modelling
Projet ERC : CreMac (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : University College de Londres — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1438705.0 €

Following the credibility revolution, macroeconomists have sought plausibly exogenous instruments and other sources of variation to identify causal effects. Given the complex nature of the macroeconomy, characterised by simultaneous causality and intemporal dependence, this is a high bar. Thus, in the pursuit of exogenous variation, researchers often use minor sources of variation or subtle features of the data to identify the effects of interest. When the variation exploited is modest, “weak identification” can arise. In practice, this means that estimators are no longer asymptotically normal, so standard techniques for statistical inference – conducting hypothesis tests or constructing confidence intervals – are invalid. While this likely occurs in much empirical research in macroeconomics, few papers acknowledge these issues, partially because there are rarely appealing options to address them. This proposal provides attractive options for researchers to combat weak identification in macroeconometric models. First, it offers the possibility to avoid weak identification in the first place, via novel frameworks to exploit instrumental variables in panel and time series data. These frameworks extract richer information from a given instrument and expand the set of admissible instruments. Next, I provide tools to construct confidence sets for dynamic causal effects, a key object of interest, that are valid regardless of how strong the identifying variation is. Existing approaches produce confidence sets that are conservative – too large. I first consider models identified using instrumental variables, improving both computational burden and performance relative to frontier methods. Finally, I consider models identified using more general sources of variation, and, working identification scheme by scheme, provide performance gains over leading methods for confidence sets. I thus facilitate credible inference to match credible identification strategies.

Mots-clés : time series econometrics,macroeconometrics,weak identification,weak instruments,instrumental variables,empirical macroeconomics
Projet ERC : MODFORGE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : University College de Londres — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498147.5 €

Forests encompass enormous biodiversity and provide a wealth of ecosystem services responsible for the health, well-being, and livelihoods of humans worldwide. As the climate changes, trees are expected to experience unique climate conditions far exceeding their native ranges—a situation compounded by the proliferation of non-native species worldwide. Yet there remain few approaches for reliably projecting how forests will change over the coming century, in part because current models struggle to predict how groups of species will respond. The goal of this project is to overcome these limitations by pioneering a fundamentally new modelling approach to forecasting how communities—rather than single species—will respond to the twin threats of climate change and invasive species. To do this, the proposed work will incorporate a functional and abiotic backbone into a theoretical model of community-level coexistence, overcoming the key limitation of traditional species distribution models. By applying this model to high-resolution forest inventory data, we will quantify how species' traits interact with abiotic conditions, management history, and disturbance regimes to govern the composition and resilience of forests across North America. As a result, this approach will allow us to identify: (1) how functional traits shape forest community composition, (2) how abiotic conditions affect these relationships, (3) how management history, disturbance, and extreme events mediate co-occurrence, (4) how forest communities will change over the coming decades, (5) how native and non-native species' ranges will respond, and (6) the cascading effects on biodiversity and ecosystem function. By providing robust projections of forest change across North America, these results will directly inform management efforts to foster resilient forests, while also pioneering a new generation of models for understanding how ecosystems will respond to environmental change.

Mots-clés : forest management,restoration ecology,species distribution modelling,statistical methods