Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : MitoRepairosome (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Molecules of Life: Biological Mechanisms, Structures and Functions
Entité participante : University of Gdańsk — Pays : Pologne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UG
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

In mammalian cells genetic information is stored in two compartments: in the nucleus and in the mitochondria. DNA in mitochondria (mtDNA), just like in theIn mammalian cells genetic information is stored in two locations: in the nucleus and in mitochondria. DNA in mitochondria, just like in the nucleus, must be faithfully copied and mistakes (i.e. mutations due to exogenous and endogenous DNA damaging agents) lead to formation of DNA lesions. Persistence of these DNA lesions leads to genomic instability and human diseases like cardiovascular, skeletal muscular and neurological disorders, cancer as well as normal aging process. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is anchored to the inner mitochondrial membrane thus is in a close proximity to the electron transport chain and is subjected to a constant attack by reactive oxygen species (ROS), generated as byproducts of oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS). As a result mitochondria must have a robust DNA repair mechanism which becomes particularly important in non-dividing cells. It is accepted that DNA base excision repair (BER) pathway is a major defense mechanism against oxidative damage in human mitochondria. Aptly localized on mitochondrial inner membrane, mitochondrial BER enzymes: catalytic subunit of DNA polymerase γ (PolγA) along with its accessory subunit, DNA polymerase γ (PolγB), inner-membrane 5'-exo/endonuclease (EXOG), Apurinic/apyrimidinic endonuclease 1 (APE1) and Ligase 3 (Lig3) form a membrane-bound, high molecular weight, complexes called “mitochondrial repairosome”, capable of carrying out complete DNA repair. Although BER can be readily detected in mitochondria and major components have been identified, the spatial-temporal organization of mitochondrial repairosome and molecular mechanism by which mtDNA is repaired is not well understood. The goal of this research project is to provide fundamental mechanistic insights into the assembly, composition, activities and structures of human mitochondrial repairosome.

Mots-clés : dna replication and repair,mitochondrial dna,structural biology,mechanism,motor proteins
Projet ERC : ARRAY SEQ (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Technion – Israel Institute of Technology — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

In many biomedical research and clinical applications it would be tremendously useful to know the gene expression profile of each and every cell in a sample, be it a blood sample or tumor. At present, the most advanced single-cell technologies are limited to a few thousand cells by a laborious and expensive approach. We have invented a method allowing the determination of the transcriptomes of millions of cells in parallel, using array-based technique for tagging single cells. The protocol combines our previously published protocol for single cell transcriptomics – CEL-Seq – with a new membrane based system for capturing single cells and a DNA microarray for differentially tagging each cell in the membrane. If further developed into a commercial platform, our method could have tremendous impact on clinical and research transcriptomics. Our method requires no expensive equipment, low amounts of reagents and little hands-on, making it unlike any available protocol for single cell analysis. Our method also has great versatility as it can be used for analyzing up to a million cells, but can also be easily scaled down to several hundreds, promising to make it the state of the art protocol for any lab interested in single cell biology. Our method thus represents a game-changer because it completely reinvents the scale under which cells can be examined – affordably and without a need for expensive instruments – by at least three orders of magnitude. The aim of this project is to establish a user-friendly platform for our method that could be commercially available in the coming years. The developed platform will facilitate a large-scale ability to query cells; the breadth of possible research and personal medicine applications is unimaginable at present.

Mots-clés : single cell transcriptomics,massively parallel cell analysis,micro pore membrane,cancer,therapeutics,blood sample diagnostics
Projet ERC : TAMING (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1450625.0 €

In many important areas and applications of science one has to solve non convex optimization problems and ideally and ultimately one would like to find the global optimum. However in most cases one is faced with NP-hard problems and therefore in practice one has been often satisfied with only a local optimum obtained with some ad-hoc (local) optimization algorithm. TAMING intends to provide a systematic methodology for solving hard non convex polynomial optimization problems in all areas of science. Indeed the last decade has witnessed the emergence of Polynomial Optimization as a new field in which powerful positivity certificates from real algebraic geometry have permitted to develop an original and systematic approach to solve (at global optimality) optimization problems with polynomial (and even semi-algebraic) data. The backbone of this powerful methodology is the « moment-SOS » approach also known as « Lasserre hierarchy » which has attracted a lot of attention in many areas (e.g., optimization, applied mathematics, quantum computing, engineering, theoretical computer science) with important potential applications. It is now a basic tool for analyzing hardness of approximation in combinatorial optimization and the best candidate algorithm to prove/disprove the famous Unique Games Conjecture. Recently it has also become a promising new method for solving the important Optimal Power Flow Problem in the strategic domain of Energy Networks (as the only method that could solve to optimality certain types of such problems). However in its present form this promising methodology inherits a high computational cost and a (too) severe problem size limitation which precludes from its application many important real life problems of significant size. Proving that indeed this methodology can fulfill its promises and solve important practical problems in various areas poses major theoretical & practical challenges.

Mots-clés : global optimization,nonlinear,discrete and combinatorial optimization,hierarchies of convex relaxations,sums of squares hierarchies,control,optimal control,computational geometry
Projet ERC : AUTOCOMPLEMENT (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases
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 : 1999802.5 €

In many prevalent autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) autoantibodies are used as diagnostic and prognostic tools. Several of these autoantibodies target proteins that have been post-translationally modified (PTM). Examples of such modifications are citrullination and carbamylation. The success of B cell-targeted therapies in many auto-antibody positive diseases suggests that B cell mediated auto-immunity is playing a direct pathogenic role. Despite the wealth of information on the clinical associations of these anti-PTM protein antibodies as biomarkers we have currently no insight into why these antibodies are formed. Immunization studies reveal that PTM proteins can induce antibody responses even in the absence of exogenous adjuvant. The reason why these PTM proteins have ‘autoadjuvant’ properties that lead to a breach of tolerance is currently unknown. In this proposal, I hypothesise that the breach of tolerance towards PTM proteins is mediated by complement factors that bind directly to these PTM. Our preliminary data indeed reveal that several complement factors bind specifically to PTM proteins. Complement could be involved in the autoadjuvant property of PTM proteins as next to killing pathogens complement can also boost adaptive immune responses. I plan to unravel the importance of the complement–PTM protein interaction by answering these questions: 1) What is the physiological function of complement binding to PTM proteins? 2) Is the breach of tolerance towards PTM proteins influenced by complement? 3) Can the adjuvant function of PTM be used to increase vaccine efficacy and/or decrease autoreactivity? With AUTOCOMPLEMENT I will elucidate how PTM-reactive B cells receive ‘autoadjuvant’ signals. This insight will impact on patient care as we can now design strategies to either block unwanted ‘autoadjuvant’ signals to inhibit autoimmunity or to utilize ‘autoadjuvant’ signals to potentiate vaccination.
Projet ERC : OSIRIS (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : KU Leuven — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KUL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

In medicine, it is often essential to know to what extent a person can understand speech. Current methods to measure speech understanding involve playing specially crafted sentences to the person, letting the person repeat them, and scoring the result manually. This requires active participation of the person, specialised speech material, and is labour intensive. We present a system to measure speech understanding fully automatically. We record brain responses while the person listens to a recording of natural speech, and apply signal processing to derive speech intelligibility. The person does not need to actively participate, which enables testing of a large variety of populations that cannot be tested with traditional methods, such as young children and people with mental impairment. The measurement result relates to everyday communication skills. Our system will make diagnostics cheaper and enable diagnostics outside a specialized clinical center because the system can operate fully automatically.

Mots-clés : speech understanding,measurement,hearing,diagnostics,screening
Projet ERC : STEREOM3D (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : University of Birmingham — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

In most synthetic polymeric materials, control over the mechanical properties of the material is achieved by changing the fundamental chemical structure of the polymer by using monomers with fundamentally different functional groups, chain length or rigidity. In contrast, Nature’s polymers use a more restricted set of building blocks but use additional complexity to the structure−property relationship by leveraging stereochemistry to control the structure and hence properties and function of materials. Through the STEREOPOL ERC programme, we have been investigating this relationship and how to both overcome the synthetic limitations that hold back the design of stereoregular materials, as well as how these fundamental properties can be used to influence materials properties and behaviour. Within this project, and inspired by the cis/trans stereochemistry that dictates the enormous differences in mechanical properties between the otherwise structurally identical gutta percha and natural rubber, we have discovered that E/Z isomerisism within double bonds in synthetically-accessible polymers can be used to control mechanical properties of the resultant thermoplastic elastomer materials. Through this work, we have identified that these principles can be extended to photoset materials (those that are crosslinked by exposure to light), while retaining their elastomeric nature. In turn, this advance enables us to develop the first 3-dimensional (3D) printed elastomers with material properties that are determined by stereochemical composition. The ability to control materials properties by stereochemical leverage will reduce the need to reformulate each composition for processing by 3D printing, thus providing a significant commercial advantage in an area in which competitive materials are limited but in which there is a significant need.

Mots-clés : polymer,stereochemistry,3d printing
Projet ERC : LEIT (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 137500.0 €

In nanoelectronic circuits, interconnects use more energy than microprocessors, a situation clearly undesirable for e.g. autonomous Internet of Things applications based on charge and other information tokens. Overcoming this issue and minimising overall power consumption will be of paramount importance as we move towards Beyond-CMOS circuits. A novel approach is required. In LEIT I propose to investigate phonons as information carriers with typical ultralow energies of a fraction of a meV. As quanta of lattice vibrations, the high interactivity of phonons presents two key challenges: phonon-phonon scattering and losses in waveguides caused by interaction with e.g. lattice defects. I propose to overcome this by engineering phonon-phonon scattering in custom-designed phononic crystal-based structures moving towards narrow frequencies and non-interacting phonons at room temperature. These structures will exhibit a unique combination of features to allow phonon filtering, reflection and confinement, as well as transmission from one element (source) to another (modulator and waveguides), all of which will serve to direct and guide the phonon waves. Phonon losses will be minimised even eradicated by using topological phononic waveguides to transmit phonons over micrometre distances. The technological platforms will be made from silicon (Si) and Si-compatible materials, also incorporating transition metal dichalcogenides in order to reach the higher frequencies. In LEIT I will draw on my extensive experimental research on phonons in semiconductor nanostructures, Si membranes and phononic crystals to demonstrate the viability of acoustic phonons as low-energy information carriers. By doing so I will lay the scientific and technological foundations of a new phononics-based approach to information processing, offering a means of transmitting information that is extremely low-power and lossless, while also compact and integrable with Si-technologies.

Mots-clés : phonon signal transmission,phonons in si,si membranes,phononic crystals,low energy phonon transport,phononic interconnects,topological phonon waveguides,surface acoustic waves,brillouin scattering,ir imaging
Projet ERC : QDLight (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Weizmann Institute of Science — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 100000.0 €

In optical microscopy low-cost solid state LEDs and lasers have replaced traditional light sources. Major drawbacks of such, typically fiber-coupled light sources are poor flexibility, low modularity and high cost. Since a complete separate system is needed for every excitation color, the size of the economical investment is hindering the adoption of the technology directly contributing to improved research quality in multiple disciplines. This PoC project derives from SINSLIM ERC Starting grant project, which developed new light sources for sub-diffraction limited imaging. The PoC project demonstrates an inexpensive and versatile fiber-coupled incoherent light source. The light source is based on polymer fibers incorporating luminescent nanocrystals, which are essentially light-absorbing and light-emitting threads. The nanocrystal properties in the fiber enable flexible tuning of the emitted light color. The brightness of the novel light source will exceed the current state-of-the-art fiber-coupled LED brightness by nearly an order of magnitude. The demonstrated light source can play an important role in optical imaging and therapy applications due to the ability to achieve high fluxes in small area fibers, replacing costly and cumbersome halogen lamps. The innovation can also be applied in new specific light emitting and light harvesting applications as it delivers powerful multi-wavelength light and also collects it through small areas. The PoC project combines the earlier scientific SINSLIM discoveries with state-of-the-art industry manufacturing knowledge paving the way for creating practical, cost-efficient, bright and tunable future light-source applications. The disciplines directly benefiting from the PoC results comprise Biomedical imaging, highly growing Optogenetics, Photodynamic Therapy, Biolight therapy and completely new industry segments addressing the $100B lighting markets.

Mots-clés : semiconductor quantum dots,polymer optical fibers,optical microscopy,lighting
Projet ERC : TERAMAG (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : Freie Universität Berlin — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : FU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1719313.0 €

In order to fully exploit the electron spin as a signal carrier in future information processing, spins need to be transported and flipped as fast as possible. Spintronics research aims at implementing these operations by electric fields in circuitry, but has so far been limited to frequencies below ~10 GHz. The much faster complementary femtomagnetism approach employs femtosecond laser pulses (carrier frequency ~400 THz), but is not compatible with microelectronics technology. In the TERAMAG project, I will apply intense terahertz (THz) electromagnetic pulses to solids to realize 1) ultrafast transport of spins and magnons, and 2) ultrafast control over magnetic order. Our strategy relies on extending concepts from the fields of spintronics (electronics) and femtomagnetism (optics) to the elusive THz frequency gap (0.3 to 30 THz), thereby combining the benefits of both worlds. To realize spin operations and open up new pathways to their implementation, it is essential to understand the underlying microscopic processes. THz radiation is an ideal tool for this task as it directly and uniquely interacts with many fundamental modes and couplings of solids at their natural frequencies. For example, by using ultrashort THz pulses, we will obtain unprecedented insights into the energetic structure of spin-orbit coupling of equilibrium and nonequilibrium conduction electrons (e.g. in metals and two-dimensional semiconductors) and into the unexplored but highly relevant interaction of optical phonons with spins, including magnons. Novel measurement schemes (e.g. of the spin Hall effect from ~0.3 to 30 THz) and applications (such as spintronic THz emitters and detectors) will emerge.

Mots-clés : terahertz,ultrafast
Projet ERC : TRIPOD (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Helmholtz Centre Potsdam - GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : GFZ
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1116846.12 €

In order to meet its long-term climate targets, the European Union has decided to reduce its power sector carbon emissions by 93-99% by 2050. This means that Europe aims to transition to a largely, or fully, renewable power system. This is however not the only energy policy aim: besides a transition to renewables, further aims include an energy efficiency increase and demand reduction; liberalisation of the power markets and exposure of renewables to competition; and europeanisation of renewable energy policy, power grids, and the creation of a European internal power market. Here, I investigate whether and how these policies interact and affect the chances for and costs of a transition to a renewable power system; how the other aims constrain the options for renewables; and how policy conflicts can be resolved. Current policy discourse treats these policy aims either as independent or synergistic. My hypothesis is that they are not at all independent and that pursuing the aims of demand reduction, liberalisation and europeanisation strongly influences the transition to renewables, and that the aims are partially antagonistic, implying a need for trade-offs. The purpose of my research is to test these hypotheses and explore the policy synergies or antagonisms, by investigating yet under-researched aspects of the interactions. These include how reaching the other aims influences the transition dynamics; how key actors may alter their behaviour due to such other developments; and how reaching another policy aim impacts the stability of a fully renewable power system. I adopt an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on transition research, engineering, political science and economics, with each perspective adding a piece of the puzzle. The answers will contribute to both the disciplinary and the policy-driven renewable energy research, and provide insights to help policy-makers define less conflicting policies, thus supporting the European transition to renewables.

Mots-clés : renewable electricity,policy interactions
Projet ERC : HD-Neu-Screen (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ETH Zurich
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

In order to overcome the limitations of existing methods for phenotypic drug screening, we propose to develop accurate, label-free, functional neuronal assays for phenotypic/functional drug screening in vitro. These assays will rely on the primary readout of neurons - their electrical signals. We propose to translate and commercialize the assessment of characteristic electrophysiological features of subcellular neuronal components, individual neurons and neuronal networks, all of which can be obtained with high-density microelectrode array technology (HD-MEA), into functional neuronal assays for drug screening. Most of these characteristic features have been developed in the concurrent ERC AdG “neuroXscales”. The model systems for the PoC will include commercially available hiPSC-derived neuronal cell lines. The PoC will be performed in collaboration with the company MaxWell Biosystems AG (http://www.mxwbio.com/), which commercializes multi-well HD-MEA platforms for use in research labs and industry.

Mots-clés : high density microelectrode arrays,extracellular electrophysiology,human ipsc derived neurons,drug testing,neuronal assays