Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : FermiChem (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The determination of ground states of many interacting fermions is a key application for future quantum computers with significant implications for the design of new materials and the prediction of reaction pathways in chemistry. Recently, we put forward the proposal Simulating Chemistry with Fermionic Optical Superlattices, establishing ultracold fermions in optical lattices as a promising computational platform for this task. This approach uses the hard-wired fermionic symmetries of ultracold atoms to potentially outperform spin-based quantum computers.  The project FermiChem will turn this theoretical proposal into application and enable the first experimental demonstration of fermionic quantum processing with ultracold atoms. We will pursue three aims: (1) To generate fermionic quantum circuits for measuring arbitrary correlation functions for condensed matter; (2) To provide computer code to connect our UniRand fermionic quantum simulator to high-level programming languages and to execute such fermionic circuits in hardware; (3) To validate the design of a new type of tweezer architecture with dramatically enhanced motional coherence properties. Together, these innovations will establish a full stack for fermionic computing and translate our proposal for computation with fermionic circuits in superlattices into experiments with real-world applications.  Our work will be embedded in a network of collaborations with academic and industry partners in order to guide the development of soft- and hardware towards fermionic quantum computation. FermiChem will point the way towards using fermionic quantum systems for industry-relevant problems in chemistry and material science.
Projet ERC : THINK DEEP-IMAGINE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Royal Holloway — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

THINK DEEP: IMAGINE?’s unique value proposition lies in its innovative arts-based response to the pressing challenge of ‘thinking differently’ about Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining (ASM). In 2019 the World Bank envisioned a new future for ASM in which this challenging sector escapes its persistently negative stereotypes to realise its central place within global development in socially and environmentally just ways. Such a vision is neither without controversy nor easy to achieve as ASM is plagued by two challenges:  i.Data gaps and invisibilities – how to research a sector that is usually secretive, increasingly criminalised and often subject to underhand corporate and government practices? ii.Too simple stories of mining, which perpetuate imaginations of miners as victims of poverty and as unskilled social deviants and environmental pariahs. Breakthrough research with artisanal miners in Cambodia conducted on the ERC project THINK DEEP evidenced the value of novel arts-based research methods for tackling the first challenge, generating a unique archive of materials combining world-leading art with cutting-edge research. THINK DEEP: IMAGINE?’s high risk-high gain proposition is that arts-based resources created from this archive can respond to the second challenge. Building on THINK DEEP's benefit-sharing discussions and in collaboration with Cambodian artists, curators, researchers, miners and ASM stakeholders, we will i) experiment with and ii) evaluate the impacts of ‘putting research on display’ (via an exhibition, image-led book and online resources). Developing proof-of-concept for arts-based resources, we aim to: i. Reshape imaginations of Cambodia’s largely invisible and often dismissed ASM sector to tackle what local NGOs predict as its currently 'bleak futures.' ii. Develop a toolkit to share best-practice in producing arts-based resources on ASM, thereby supporting the World Bank in realising its vision for ASM’s place within global development.
Projet ERC : VISOR (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Bergen — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Climatic change will have large impacts on the global water cycle, and thus on hazardous weather and the availability of water to society. Earth observation from the ground and space is necessary to detect how and where the water cycle changes. The stable isotope composition of water vapour and precipitation is a sensitive indicator of ongoing and future water cycle changes. Continuous, ground-based observation of water vapour isotopes has recently become possible by the more widespread use of infrared laser spectroscopy. However, there is currently a lack of solutions that would allow to fully and easily characterize these analyzers and the corresponding air inlet system with regard to several important measurement artefacts that degrade data quality. Within the ERC CoG project ISLAS, we have developed a prototype of the VISOR device that would fill this gap, based on a technology that has so far rarely been used for this purpose. Possessing a substantial range of flexibility, the VISOR device furthermore has the potential to reduce measurement time and thus the cost of routine liquid water isotope measurements in laboratory measurements. Exploring the innovation potential of the VISOR device may therefore enable a breakthrough in two application sectors: 1) scaling up networks for water vapour isotope Earth observation globally, thus enabling better climate hazard preparedness, and 2) become a first choice for laboratories that measure water isotopes for research, forensic analysis, or the control of food origin.
Projet ERC : ASTRA (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Southampton — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Recent advances in controlling the topological structure of light open up opportunities for new information and energy carriers with applications from telecommunications and spectroscopy to metrology, imaging, and remote sensing. However, despite the application potential of topologically structured light, its generation and detection remains a complex and challenging task that hinders practical applications. In our earlier ERC FLEET project, we developed methods for the generation and detection of topologically structured electromagnetic pulses and highlighted their exotic light-matter interactions. However, such complex approaches require specialist expertise and are sensitive to noise and perturbations. From the FLEET effort, the concept of a simple and compact detector of topologically structured light emerged based on geometrical phase resulting in robust broadband performance. This project aims at bringing this concept to life by developing a prototype of the topological light detector operating at the microwave part of the spectrum and assessing its performance in “real-world” conditions, while targeting applications in line-of-sight information transfer and energy harvesting.
Projet ERC : BenchHyp (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Lyon-I université — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Lyon I
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a powerful analytical technique in chemistry, pharmaceuticals, and metabolomics, but requires complex and expensive infrastructure, limiting its widespread adoption. Since recently, the development of Benchtop NMR spectrometers offers a simple, compact, and low-cost alternative compared to traditional high-field systems, and their market has seen a significant growth. However, benchtop NMR faces a critical restraint which is its order of magnitude lower sensitivity. Hyperpolarization by dissolution dynamic nuclear polarization (dDNP) offers a solution by dramatically enhancing NMR signal strength but is limited to a handful of groups due to its complexity and dramatic costs, as it operates at high-fields and very low temperatures. The BenchHyp project introduces a breakthrough approach by developing a compact, reusable, and scalable hyperpolarization system compatible with benchtop NMR spectrometers. The core innovation is a flow cryostat with a sliding-sample mechanism, enabling continuous hyperpolarization without sample destruction or dilution. Unlike conventional dDNP, BenchHyp allows multiple reuses of hyperpolarized solutions, significantly reducing costs and enabling real-time, repeated measurements for applications in chemical analysis, pharmaceutical quality control, and metabolomics. This Proof of Concept will advance the technology from TRL 2 to TRL 4, focusing on prototype optimization, industrial validation, and market assessment. The project will also explore commercialization pathways, evaluating licensing, co-development with industry, or a spin-off. An IP strategy and freedom-to-operate analysis will be conducted to safeguard the innovation. BenchHyp has the potential to revolutionize benchtop NMR, bridging the gap between cutting-edge hyperpolarization and routine laboratory applications, paving the way for its widespread industrial adoption and market deployment.
Projet ERC : SMARTISTIC (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Picardie Jules Verne — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UPJV
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The SMARTISTIC project aims at developing and demonstrating a first prototype of a smart and interactive Augmented Reality (AR) software designed to assist in the decision-making of battery scientists, engineers and operators while they are working in electrode formulation and manufacturing in laboratories or in production lines. The software will be usable from tablets and AR glasses by touch gesture and hand gesture respectively. The software will blend holograms with the real world manufacturing equipment. Such holograms will be powered with the unique physical and machine learning (ML) models developed and validated experimentally in my ERC CoG ARTISTIC project and which can predict the impact of manufacturing parameters on the final electrode properties. By interacting with the holograms and without the need of programming skills, a user can in real-time create databases from her/his ongoing experiments, launch computations for analysis of experimental results, or request ML predictions about the impact of her/his intended formulation and manufacturing process on the electrode properties. She/he can also use the software to analyze possible deviations between the experimental results and the predictions to identify more easily factors that could explain unexpected experimental results. The prototype will be developed by accounting for the users' needs and from the observation of work situations. Once developed, we will perform tests and demonstrations to assess the software usability and ergonomics for its improvement while used in real situations. They will be carried out in the battery manufacturing platform of our laboratory and in companies and in institutes which already manifested interest in our proof of concept. The assessments will permit improving the software to ensure its wide acceptance. We will also analyze the IP, technology transfer and market opportunities to valorize the intended software, also thanks to networking activities.
Projet ERC : LIFECOURSE-ABM (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Reykjavik — Pays : Islande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : RU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

We, the LIFECOURSE team, have been developing a theoretical framework that combines biological, social, and psychological data into unified concepts over the past five years. We now have a combined biopsychosocial data framework that can be used to uncover and understand biosocial causal pathways to adolescent behaviour, including self-harm, suicide, substance-use, and delinquancy. To our knowledge, we possess the only linkage of high-quality biological, environmental, and social data across several developmental stages of life to matched longitudinal data (N=4000). In the proposed proof of concept we propose to build a computational infrastructure on this framework, creating a fully digitized toolkit that can benefit from digital automation, communication, and artificial intelligence methods. At the center of this strategy is a new detailed biopsychosocial computer simulation model. This first stage of development – a proof of concept – will already bring our data beyond current capabilities. We see this work as a necessary next step, taking the LIFECOUSE project beyond the state-of-the-art once again, with several fundamental implications and broad industrial, societal, and scientific impact.
Projet ERC : AMEN (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Bordeaux INP — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : IPB
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Enantiodiscrimination is one of the major challenges in contemporary chemistry. Chiral molecules exist in two non-superimposable mirror image forms, which induce different effects in biological systems. Thus, they need to be produced in a stereoselective way, especially for pharmaceutical use. The motivation and societal relevance of this project is based on the fact that if the wrong enantiomers are present in pharmaceuticals, their effects can be toxic or even lethal, as has been exemplified by the scandal around the use of racemic mixtures of thalidomide in the 1960ies. Subsequently, it became obvious, and strongly recommended by the FDA and European legislation, that medication should contain pure enantiomers. Therefore, there is a strong and constantly increasing need to develop advanced technologies that allow a selective production of enantiomers by new synthesis strategies. This challenge is at the heart of the AMEN project. We plan to follow an unconventional concept, developed during the ERC Advanced grant ELECTRA, in order to obtain single enantiomers instead of racemic mixtures. This is achieved by directing the transformation of molecules towards one of the two possible enantiomers with the help of autonomously moving chiral microreactors. The fundamental strategy has been already validated with proof-of-principle experiments during the ERC Advanced project and showed extremely high selectivity, efficiency, and controllability, however only at the laboratory scale. Therefore, we plan as a next logic step with technology transfer character, to investigate in detail the possibility of scaling up this process and to evaluate its commercial viability and competitivity.

Mots-clés : enantioselective synthesis chirality microswimmers microreactors self mixing
Projet ERC : VRAI-CURE (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : ARMINES — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Intracranial aneurysms (IAs) pose a severe neurovascular threat, with rupture leading toIntracranial aneurysms (IAs) pose a severe neurovascular threat, with rupture leading to life-threatening complications. Current treatment planning relies on static imaging and computational fluid dynamics, which are computationally expensive and lack real-time clinical integration. Clinicians face uncertainty in selecting optimal intervention strategies, increasing procedural risks and costs. VRAI-CURE proposes an AI-driven clinical decision support system that combines Physics-Constrained Graph Neural Networks for real-time hemodynamic simulation and immersive Virtual Reality (VR) visualization. This system enables instantaneous, patient-specific blood flow predictions, transforming clinical workflows by providing neurovascular specialists with actionable insights for treatment planning. Unlike conventional simulation or imaging methods, the proposed AI-based approach is computationally efficient, self-improving with each new patient case, and seamlessly integrates into standard imaging workflows (MRI, CT, angiography). By delivering an interactive VR-based visualization of blood flow dynamics, VRAI-CURE enhances clinical understanding of aneurysm behavior and treatment effects, facilitating personalized decision-making. Our preliminary validation demonstrates superior accuracy and efficiency compared to existing techniques, addressing a significant gap in neurovascular intervention. With the VR healthcare market projected to reach $40 billion by 2032, the transformative potential extends beyond neurovascular medicine, offering a cutting-edge solution in a rapidly expanding sector. This project aims to advance to TRL 6, developing a certified clinical prototype ready for industrial transfer. The project’s high-risk/high-gain potential positions it as a transformative innovation in precision neurovascular medicine, with broad implications for AI-driven clinical decision support.
Projet ERC : DISRUPT-KF (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : University Hospital Aachen — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UKA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a progressive disease in which kidney function is gradually lost. It can develop consequent of many (kidney) diseases and it affects more than 10% of the world population. Although in recent years sodium–glucose cotransporter 2 inhibitors and novel non-steroidal mineralocorticoid antagonists are showing significant effects on CKD, the majority of patients treated still progress towards end-stage renal disease (ESRD). With dialysis or kidney transplantation as the sole treatments available in case of ESRD, the disease represents an enormous burden on healthcare costs throughout Europe. Caused by organ injury, fibrosis leads to replacement of functional tissue and organ architecture by extracellular matrix, leading to tissue scar formation and impaired function of the affected organ. This makes fibrosis a key therapeutic target to improve organ function in e.g., CKD. Myofibroblasts are the key driver cells of fibrosis across organs and research in our lab has demonstrated that targeting myofibroblasts stabilises organ function. Additionally, we have identified GLI1/2 as a myofibroblast cell-cycle progression-specific target. We found that the number of Gli proteins, transcriptional effectors of the Hedgehog signalling pathway, are significantly increased in the kidney after injury. Furthermore, GLI1/2 are ideal targets as they are not expressed during homeostasis in adults. DISRUPT-KF will validate a set of novel Gli inhibitors as disease-modifying drug candidates for CKD. Preliminary evidence shows anti-fibrotic efficacy in human 2D culture platforms and in induced pluripotent stem cell-derived kidney organoids in vitro. During DISRUPT-KF we will further verify and optimise the anti-fibrotic drug candidates in relevant in vitro (kidney fibrosis organoids) and in vivo (mice) models to validate their potential. We will also develop and execute an IP strategy and a commercial feasibility analysis to enter the anti-fibrotic CKD market.
Projet ERC : LGSMAIZE (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz Y Trigo — Pays : Mexique — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : CIMMYT
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 50000.0 €

The parasitic witchweeds, such as Striga hermonthica and Striga asiatica, pose an enormous threat for production of cereal crops, such as sorghum, millet and maize, in the African continent, threatening the livelihood of millions of people, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Striga seeds lay dormant in the soil until their germination is triggered by strigolactones (SLs), signaling compounds exuded by roots of plants, including maize. Maize exudes at least six different SLs from its roots into the rhizosphere, two of which were structurally identified as zealactone and zeapyranolactone. In work on maize strigolactone biosynthesis that was part of the ERC Advanced grant CHEMCOMRHIZO we demonstrated that there is natural variation in the germination stimulant composition in the root exudate of maize varieties and that this results in a degree of Striga resistance. We have elucidated the entire biosynthetic pathway of all SLs in maize and we showed that the difference in strigolactone composition is the result of a difference in the expression of one of the genes in the pathway. The line with the strongest reduction in the expression of this gene, a North-American cultivar, displays almost full Striga resistance compared with a susceptible control. In collaboration with the CGIAR institute CIMMYT, we propose to create knock-out lines in this gene in two elite African maize varieties to deliver the proof-of-concept that this Striga resistance can be introduced into Africa.
Projet ERC : HAZGUARD (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de St Andrews — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Augmented reality (AR) technology is uniquely positioned in the tech landscape, offering the ability to overlay digital information directly onto the physical world, distinct from virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR). Existing and next-generation AR glasses are sophisticated and expensive and are far from meeting the needs of large sections of the general population. For example, despite the advancements in AR, a significant gap exists in catering to users with partial visual or auditory impairments. Our project introduces an innovative solution that transforms any standard pair of glasses into advanced AR headsets. These headsets can display fixed, predetermined images, which can be paired with environmental sensors to alert the users to potential dangers through clear signals projected onto the retina. Leveraging holographic metasurface technology, our solution overcomes common challenges of traditional AR glasses such as bulkiness, limited field of view, and poor visibility in outdoor environments. The flexibility and lightness of the holographic metasurfaces ensure that our clip-on module is not only effective but also comfortable for everyday wear. Our primary goal is to enhance the day-to-day experiences of visually or auditory impaired individuals, facilitating safer and more accessible navigation through their environments.