Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : pepTalks (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : Antoni van Leeuwenhoekziekenhuis — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : AVL
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Shortages in amino acids are weapons in the warfare between tumor cells and tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes. Tumor cells enhance or inhibit the production of key amino acid metabolites to stimulate oncogenesis and suppress anti-tumor activity. A key player in this battle is tryptophan. Activated T cells secrete interferon-γ, which upregulates IDO1 enzyme to catabolize tryptophan to kynurenine in target tumor cells. While kynurenine suppresses T-cell function, its production limits tryptophan availability in tumor cells. Importantly, as tumor cells almost invariably deregulate mRNA translation to promote proliferation and metastasis, the consequences of tryptophan shortage are major. It provokes aberrant mRNA translation at tryptophan codons, resulting in ribosomal frameshifting and tryptophan to phenylalanine (W>F) codon reassignments (substitutants). This aberrant mRNA translation alters protein function and enriches the landscape of neoepitopes at the surface of tumor cells. Based on these observations, I hypothesize here that the detection of aberrant proteins in cancer specimens can reveal additional key processes of cancer progression beyond tryptophan that can be utilized for cancer therapy. To explore this exciting new idea, I designed three work packages (WPs): WP1 will expand the landscape of aberrant mRNA translation in cancer and link them to cancerous events. Preliminary results pinpoint arginine, histidine, and leucine. WP2 will generate reporter assays, set up functional genetic screens, and identify, validate, and explore key regulators of aberrant mRNA translation. WP3 will study the functional consequences of aberrant mRNA translation, and introduce novel therapeutic concepts. Altogether, this proposal will employ our recent discoveries of aberrant mRNA translation during periods of amino acid shortages to explore novel interplays between cancers and their suppressive microenvironment, and utilize this new knowledge for cancer therapy.

Mots-clés : mrna translation,amino acid shortages,cellular stress,t cells,adoptive immunotherapy,cancer
Projet ERC : MFA (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Studies of Cultures and Arts
Entité participante : Université de Londres — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UoL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1887687.25 €

Many young African lives are paused in ‘waithood’ (Honwana 2012): no longer children but unable to become independent adults. Many manage this situation through sport, religion, or both. The question at the heart of MFA is how sport and religion in tandem provide a way out of ‘waithood’.  Sport and religion alternately reference each other as performance enhancers. Both have been posited as catalysts for development and integration, however, their interplay remains under-theorised. Social science views sport through a secular lens, while religious studies have been slow to recognise the ‘religious’ elements of sport. If they do, studies are limited to a Western, Christian context. MFA will span existing academic siloes by taking a multidisciplinary approach, considering the interplay between sport and religion from a non-Western, non-Christian perspective.  Africa is known as the ‘sporting continent’ and Africans as the ‘most religious people’, making it a unique setting to investigate i) the ‘sport-religion nexus’ – how each appropriates the other’s values and practices and how they affect each other; and ii) how this nexus enables meaning and purpose. MFA will 1) deepen understanding of the sport-religion nexus; 2) innovate an Afrocentric, actor-oriented approach focused on lived experience; 3) centre Africa’s global sporting prowess, redressing misconceptions of Africa as peripheral; and 4) assess the potential of the sport-religion nexus as a catalyst for youth development. This will be achieved through case studies that document sports appropriating elements from different religions (Christianity, Islam, and African Endogenous Religions): boxing in Nigeria; soccer in South Africa; karate in Egypt; long-distance running in Kenya.  MFA’s dissemination and open-access academic, creative, and policy outputs will contribute to decolonising knowledge production about Africa, fostering South-North collaborations, and enhancing capacity development in Africa.

Mots-clés : sport,religion,youth,gender,faith based development,africa,ethnography
Projet ERC : CONTRACT (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : Northeastern University London — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : NCH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2489890.0 €

CONTRACT sets out to investigate a novel, theoretically principled, framework for the reliable deployment of artificial intelligence (AI)-based black-box models in wireless systems. Given the highly non-deterministic patterns of traffic and connectivity conditions, AI is currently viewed as an essential technology to ensure the support of communication services with widely heterogeneous performance requirements, ranging from cloud gaming to Industry 4.0. However, AI ``apps'' are, by and large, black boxes, whose introduction within the larger wireless network raises critical concerns about reliability. These concerns are not addressed by the vast literature on AI for wireless systems, which adopts a standard ``train-and-deploy'' best-effort approach. The main goal of CONTRACT is to endow for the first time AI-based wireless deployments with formal reliability guarantees. To this end, CONTRACT will introduce novel methodologies for: (i) the offline calibration of pre-trained AI apps via hyperparameter optimization prior to deployment; and (ii) the online run-time monitoring of key performance indicators and conflicts among simultaneously deployed apps. In CONTRACT, hyperparameter optimization and online monitoring will leverage contextual information describing traffic and connectivity conditions, as well as synthetic data from a digital twin, i.e., a simulator, of the wireless network. The research will build on conformal prediction, a statistical framework for assumption-free calibration, and on prediction-powered inference as a mechanism for the reliable integration of synthetic data. This project will lead to a reconsideration of the role of AI in the engineering of wireless networks from a potential reliability concern to a dependable part of the system.

Mots-clés : machine learning,statistics,information theory,conformal prediction
Projet ERC : GRABS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Université Paris 8 — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Paris VIII
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2213225.0 €

Since 2015, over 5 million people have arrived, or tried to arrive in the European Union seeking refuge. Other refugee receiving countries are faced with similar situations. Many of these refugees are young people. But whilst much has been written about the experiences of adult refugees and to a lesser extent about unaccompanied minors, there is very little research on the experiences of young refugees who are not (or are not recognized as) “unaccompanied”, and specifically about how these experiences impact their pathways to adulthood in or across borders. This in turn leads to an absence of effective policies to protect young people and to ensure their access to services which are essential to their well-being – both as young people and for their future adult lives. The project aims to provide timely new research focusing on various aspects of the experience of these young people growing up in a situation of forced migration, in order to contribute research both on youth, and on migration/mobility. In doing so it will also make recommendations on how to better support rights, agency and resilience of these young people. The research will be carried out in a range of countries in Europe (France, Greece, UK) and outside (Canada, South Africa) to analyse impacts of different social, legal and political contexts. The development of innovative methodologies combining traditional qualitative methods with social media research and digital communication tools, and emphasizing participatory research methods, will enhance the participation and self-expression of young refugees to allow them to “narrate” their lives and experiences. A feminist intersectional approach avoids essentialising young people as « vulnerable » and understands age as interacting with other social categorizations such as gender or race, to determine individual’s risks, vulnerabilities, but also possibilities for agency and resilience.

Mots-clés : forced migration,borders,youth,gender,vulnerability,intersectionality,agency,mobility
Projet ERC : G3S (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Studies of Cultures and Arts
Entité participante : Université Paris 8 — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Paris VIII
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2467853.0 €

Machine learning is particularly well-suited to the processing of ill-defined problems, where complexity rules out direct solutions; it is therefore of paramount importance in the field of music creation, where compositional knowledge is far from explicit. Until now, the generation of sound spaces has often been neglected in the application of AI to music and sound, whereas 3D spatial audio is undergoing significant industrial development. The G3S research project, designed by and for musicians and sound creators, will take sound creation to a new level by enabling the generative synthesis of sound spaces in a context of man-machine interaction. This research will challenge the very notion of space in music and revolutionize practices: we will propose new ways of creating, modeling and analyzing sound by natively integrating its spatial dimension. G3S has four research objectives: 1) to design a unified operative representation of spatial synthesis 2) to propose a thesaurus and quantitative measures to describe the spatiality of sound 3) to generate sound spaces from machine learning 4) to design interfaces for exploring spatial synthesis through listening, semantic or functional description. We will form an international research network on the subject to consider what already exists and test our new proposals; we will develop open-source environments for each of the four objectives; and we will generate musical and sound creations using the project's results. There will be a wide range of uses, from artistic creation (installations, concerts) to video games and applications on phones or in virtual reality. Finally, the developments achieved will be integrated into the workflow of sound designers, and compatible with spatial audio standards.

Mots-clés : computer music,research creation,spatiality,generativity,representation,machine learning,human machine interaction,auditory space,sound spaces,spatial audio processing
Projet ERC : Oecologie (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université Paris 8 — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : Paris VIII
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 133901.0 €

Originally, ‘ecology’ was more than just the name of a biological subdiscipline. When its inventor, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, first coined the term (German: ‘Oecologie’) in his 1866 work General Morphology, he was in fact shaping the contours of a larger philosophical project rooted in German anthropology and aesthetics. The aim of this ERC research project is to uncover this forgotten enterprise and to assess its implications. To do so, it proposes a radical change of perspective, broadening the view from the scientific dimension emphasized by Haeckel’s successors to its philosophical sources. By analyzing Haeckel’s original interpretation of the metaphor of oikos (‘habitat’, ‘dwelling’) and oikeiosis (‘adaptation’, ‘appropriation’), the project traces the shift in emphasis from the viewpoint of an external and distant God to the living organism’s own capacities for adaptation and domestic ‘householding’; it examines the place of the human organism in this ecology, as a natural being, as a human housekeeper, as part of a larger household, and as an aesthetic spectator, representing and visualizing the world from within and from the terrestrial habitat. Using a transversal methodology situated at the intersection of conceptual history, history of philosophy, history of science, aesthetics and philology, Oecologie explores the context of the emergence of this first strand of ecological thought in nineteenth-century European evolutionism (1), its philosophical sources and its debt to earlier thinkers in the German tradition, such as Kant, Alexander von Humboldt and Goethe (2), its ambiguous history of reception both in Germany and abroad (3). Last but not least, it examines the actuality and relevance of such an ecology for environmental studies and the contemporary sciences, which are struggling to regain their lost unity, to refocus on the human being, and to bridge the gap between the scientific and political strands of ecology (4).

Mots-clés : ecology,philosophy of ecology,history of ecology,haeckel,german aesthetics,arts and science,philosophical anthropology,early modern cosmology,geographical thought,evolutionary theory,darwinism,oikos,habitat,economy of nature,adaptation,balance of nature,biodiversity,non epistemic values in science,aesthetic feeling,kant,alexander von humboldt,goethe,lamarck,german history of ideas,environmental studies,eco criticism
Projet ERC : NectarGland (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Institut national de recherche pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Inrae
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Animal pollinators are vital for life on earth. While human population keeps growing, pollinator populations are dropping, thus threatening food security. In agriculture, the main insect pollinators are bees, by far.  The lack of knowledge on how domesticated plants attract and reward bees has hampered the selection of varieties with improved and mutually beneficial crop-pollinator relationships. We propose to investigate flower features, including developmental, morphological and chemical cues, in relation with bee foraging. Elucidating the molecular basis of these processes would not only help sustain yields, but it is key to understand the co-evolution of plants and pollinators.  We chose melon as a model system, because it is a strictly entomophilous crop, and because it provides all flower sexual morphs useful to probe plant-insect interactions. ForBees is a multidisciplinary project that integrates molecular genetic analysis and precise phenotyping. First, we will study melon genetic biodiversity with the aim to identify alleles that control nectar-related traits and bee attraction. The comparative analysis of wild accessions, landraces and breeding lines will further test whether domestication led to the loss of useful traits affecting insect visits. Second, we will analyse the gene networks that drive nectar gland development and nectar production. Finally, potential key regulators will be validated genetically. Through this work, we aim to develop a toolbox to tailor the morphology and chemistry of the flowers towards improved bee foraging activities.  In addition to research in melon, results from this project, and from previous works, will be translated into neglected crops of the Cucurbitaceae family. These are major food crops in many developing countries, ensuring food security and generating income for poor farmers. Yet, these crops suffer from low fruit set because of partial pollination and would greatly benefit from enhanced breeding tools.

Mots-clés : nectar,nectar gland,bees,sex determination,plant breeding,neglected crops
Projet ERC : ALTEREVO (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Institut national de recherche pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Inrae
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Environmental fluctuations are a general challenge for organisms, exacerbated in the context of global change. Many animals evolve phenotypically plastic responses to adjust to new conditions. Polyphenism is an original mechanism that produces specialized morphs to track environmental changes. Whether the molecular mechanisms underlying polyphenism evolve from the acquisition of novel genes or the rewiring of conserved environment-sensing pathways is an unresolved and challenging question as it requires well-characterized regulatory networks, including the involvement of host-microbiota molecular interactions, and relevant phylogenetic frameworks to root the evolutionary steps through which polyphenism emerged. ALTEREVO aims to understand how a nutrient-sensitive polyphenism evolves and is regulated. It uses aphids and their symbionts, to characterize the molecular regulation of nutritional polyphenism, which induces alternative morphs adapted to distinct host plants, and to elucidate how this polyphenism machinery became genetically encoded. It also addresses for the first time the role of symbionts on the evolution and regulation of animal polyphenisms. To fulfil these objectives, ALTEREVO proposes an original approach linking the evolutionary, molecular and ecological components of polyphenism, and incorporating the involvement of symbionts. It relies on metabolomics to identify plant compounds inducing alternative phenotypes, large-scale gene expression and epigenetic analyses to reveal the molecular cascade regulating morph determination, functional characterization of candidate genes, and phylogenomics to elucidate nutritional polyphenism evolution. This project will lead major progress on the mechanisms allowing rapid phenotypic adjustments to environment fluctuations and on the role of phenotypic plasticity in evolution in a holobiont context. These advances are of fundamental importance for assessing the resilience of populations to human-induced changes.

Mots-clés : phenotypic plasticity genetic innovations specialization morph determination insects symbionts
Projet ERC : melanosomeEVimmune (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
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 : 2515625.0 €

Despite remarkable progress in treating melanoma, the most lethal of human skin cancers, 50% of patients are treatment-resistant, with most experiencing disease recurrence. Our recent unpublished clinical and experimental findings uncover new, yet to be explored, melanosome contributions to cancer immunity unique to melanoma. Melanoma retains, for mostly unknown reasons, the ability of its origin to produce melanosomes, lineage-specific large extracellular vesicles (EVs) containing melanin. Surprisingly, our preliminary findings indicate that melanosomes bind and block T-cell activity in a T-cell receptor/antigen-dependent manner; melanosomes carry a neoantigen signature that is distinct from their cell of origin; and can be recycled by stoma cells, with each type endowing the melanosomes with a distinct signature, which may modulate, upon engulfment by macrophages, the latter’s phenotype in relation to melanoma. Given our novel findings and body of literature that strongly suggest an immune role for melanosomes, we here propose to comprehensively explore, for the first time, melanosomes’ effect on melanoma immunity in three directions: melanosomes’ interaction with T-cells (Aim 1), influence on melanoma immune recognition (Aim 2) and interaction with macrophages (Aim 3). This will be achieved by a strong research framework involving new experimental tools, fresh human samples, and cutting-edge in-vivo, molecular, cellular and computational models. While of tremendous complexity and scale, this project is set to offer new perspectives on melanoma progression and response to therapy. Further, our novel EV concepts will greatly advance the EV field and can also be applied to other physiological systems. Our project will also offer the scientific community new experimental tools and omics data on melanoma EVs and immunity. Finally, our project will provide new potential therapeutic means to overcome melanoma immunotherapy-resistance and block melanoma progression.

Mots-clés : melanoma,melanosome,extra cellular vesicles,melanin,pigmentation
Projet ERC : JLib (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
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 : 2308896.0 €

In the study of ancient Judaism, a debate has been raging over the place of the rabbinic movement in late antique Jewish society. On the one hand, there is the extensive body of rabbinic literature, which has much to say about the rabbis’ own world, and relatively little to say about non-rabbinic Jews, thus creating the impression that the rabbis were the only significant social factor in late antique Jewish society. On the other hand, there is an impressive, and constantly growing, body of archaeological evidence – and especially the synagogues of late antique Palestine and their elaborate mosaics – which seems to imply that the rabbis had relatively little impact on the religious and artistic sensitivities of many Jewish communities. This apparent gap between the literary and the archaeological evidence generated an enormous body of scholarly literature, with some scholars arguing that rabbinic Judaism was normative in late antique Jewish society and other scholars claiming that the rabbis were just a small minority, and that most Jews did not pay much attention to what the rabbis thought or said.  Rather than joining this debate, JLib will offer a different perspective from which to examine ancient Jewish culture, by reconstructing many non-rabbinic texts from the ‘Jewish library’ of late antiquity. Some of these texts were found in archaeological excavations, but most are found in the Cairo Genizah and in other collections of medieval Hebrew manuscripts. Their late antique origins are demonstrated by their use of Aramaic – mostly Jewish Palestinian Aramaic – by their contents, and by external evidence of their use in late antique Jewish society. JLib will offer an edition of these hitherto neglected texts, an analysis of their relations with similar non-Jewish texts and with rabbinic literature, and a re-evaluation of the complex question of the place of rabbinic Judaism in late antique Jewish society.

Mots-clés : late antiquity,jewish history,ancient judaism,rabbinic literature,astrology,divination,proverbs,magic,cross cultural contacts