Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : SHAPINCELLFATE (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Institut Curie — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 899581.25 €

Cells are often depicted as irregular spherical objects - the shape they adopt in suspension. However, the packed environment of tissues alters this simple shape, causing large cell deformations. This occurs during normal tissue growth and is even more pronounced upon tissue overgrowth, as in the case of solid tumors. Cell shape changes frequently occur in migratory cells, such as immune cells that patrol the organism within interstitial tissues, and cancer metastases that escape from the primary tumor to invade healthy tissues. In all cases, cells adapt and survive even to very large deformations. The mechanisms underlying such response and the long-term consequences that repeated cell shape changes have on physiology and pathology remain largely unknown. We have observed that changes in the shape of cells and organelle(s) induce reversible and irreversible modifications in their behaviour and function(s). We hypothesize that cells use such mechanisms to integrate the successive deformations of distinct amplitudes and durations that they experience during their lifetime. This implies the existence of “shape-induced memory effects” that not only encode the geometrical and mechanical history of the cell but also dictate its fate. Here, we propose to tackle the molecular mechanisms and physical principles accounting for shape-induced memory effects and to evaluate their impact on immunity and cancer. We will focus on two cell types that undergo large shape changes in vivo, and communicate to establish cancer immunity: (1) dendritic cells, which initiate adaptive immune responses, and (2) cancer cells derived from mammary epithelia. Our project will reveal whether boundary conditions imposed by physical confinement are overarching determinants of cellular behaviours at different spatial and temporal scales, and may further establish novel clinical paths for a holistic understanding of early malignancies and their recognition by the immune system.

Mots-clés : cell shape,cell deformation,organelle deformation,signaling pathways,dendritic cells,cancer cells,physical modeling
Projet ERC : BIOSFER (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : CO-PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2467702.0 €

High-income countries are experiencing both unprecedentedly low and increasingly polarized fertility with growing social gradients in childbearing. Key theories on fertility patterns are based on the empirical observation that until recently fertility remained comparatively high in gender-egalitarian countries with strong support for families. Since 2010 many of the countries that provided evidence for such theories have reached record-low fertility. This confronts the scientific paradigm of the key drivers of fertility.  BIOSFER investigates how social, biological and psychological factors work together to produce the observed patterns, levels and variation in fertility among young adults, and to what extent the fertility decline and the related polarization can be attributed to social vs. biomedical factors. Our multi-theory approach leverages ideas from several disciplines and proposes that the existing theories must be complemented with concepts of risk aversion and information, intergenerational transmission of fecundity, epigenetics and beyond, in order to understand modern fertility behaviour. We develop theoretically informed, falsifiable hypotheses that we test against the two richest population-based longitudinal pregnancy and pubertal cohorts in the world, MoBa in Norway and the DNBC in Denmark.  We offer a uniquely integrative life-course-based approach that is neither social or biomedical, but combines central ideas from both, and evaluates the biosocial determinants of the key transition points from fetal life through puberty and partnering into planned, unplanned, partnered and unpartnered childbearing. We study the social, biomedical and psychological forces, their interactions, and intergenerational forces as they operate throughout the life-course to produce the modern low-fertility landscape. The results will help to provide a novel, bio-social framework for understanding the life-course processes that drive contemporary fertility patterns.

Mots-clés : reproductive health,fecundity
Projet ERC : GEOASTRONOMY (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
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 : 3503268.0 €

Billions of rocky worlds likely exist around Sun-like stars in our Galaxy. Yet, attempts to understand these exoplanets lack information on the elements that compose them, the geodynamic processes that drive them, and the atmospheres that cloak them. To meet these cross-disciplinary challenges, three PIs at three institutes have combined forces to break new ground in understanding fully-formed silicate+metal+fluid (i.e. ‘rocky’) exoplanets. By synergizing astronomical data analysis with planetary geochemistry and experimental petrology and atmospheric physics/chemistry, we deviate from a purely theoretical approach via forward modeling. Instead, we blend Bayesian inference applied to telescope data and laboratory experiments with theory. Our thesis is straightforward: An exoplanet’s geologic history can only be decoded indirectly through spectroscopic observations of its atmosphere. To take advantage of remote observations of such atmospheres by next-generation telescopes we must work to understand how and why exoplanets have the physical and chemical properties they do. We devote our closely aligned efforts towards three categories of worlds around Sun-like (FGK) stars well-studied by astronomers: sub-Neptunes (exoplanets smaller than Neptune), Super Earths (exoplanets slightly larger than Earth) and “ultra-short period” (USP) exoplanets that may harbour magma oceans and atmospheres. GEOASTRONOMY fuses principles of the Geosciences with Astrophysics. Our aim is to build the chemical foundations for the exoplanet community to understand secondary (outgassed), hybrid (commingled primary- and secondary-) and magma-ocean atmospheres of already assembled mature rocky exoplanets. The proposed work is urgent because new and emerging datasets, including those being collected by the James Webb Space Telescope, are already providing constraints on these three categories of atmospheres.

Mots-clés : exoplanet atmospheres,galactic chemical evolution,bayesian inference,experimental petrology
Projet ERC : TASTADE (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Académie royale néerlandaise des arts et des sciences — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KNAW
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1747522.5 €

Abstract  From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, slave traders of mostly European origin violently transported more than 12.5 million African men, women, and children to the Americas. This was the largest forced transoceanic migration in human history. Scholars have focussed on the effects of this migration on African and American history, while treating the slave trade’s effects on European societies as marginal. This supposition of marginality stems from two biases in existing research: a focus on the companies and individuals who directly outfitted slaving voyages instead of on the far larger group of people who invested in these voyages, and an over-emphasis on slave trade profits, leaving out many other relevant indicators of the economic, political, and cultural significance of slave traders. The trans-Atlantic slave trade and the development of Europe project (TASTADE) will correct this imbalance by identifying thousands of men and women who financed the slave trade and scrutinizing their embeddedness in their local, regional, national, and transnational contexts, to answer the following research question: How did the investors in the trans-Atlantic slave trade based inside and outside Europe shape the economies, politics, and cultures of Europe? TASTADE will transform existing scholarship by delivering a ground-breaking assessment of the national and trans-national networks that facilitated this trade and by linking these networks to key aspects of European development. In realising this overarching objective, TASTADE will reshape our understanding of the history of capitalism, colonial and commercial politics, and European culture. Our unique pan-European perspective relies on the distinctive synergy of approaches provided by the members of the core research team, who will inscribe the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade fully into the story of European development and help European society confront, disclose, and memorialise the sl

Mots-clés : slavery,slave trade,trading companies,prosopography,investment,transnational analysis,legacies of empire
Projet ERC : DarkQuantum (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 300000.0 €

The unresolved nature of the Dark Matter permeating our Universe is one of the most pressing questions of modern science. It is connected to our very understanding of reality at the most fundamental level. The axion DM paradigm has recently emerged as one of the most compelling hypothesis to solve this question: Dark Matter would be composed by very light and very feebly interacting axions. This paradigm is strongly motivated by theory, and predicts a clear signal in terrestrial experiments called axion haloscopes. Pioneering experiments have reached enough sensitivity to test some realistic axion models in limited mass ranges, so far without a positive signal. However, there is still a large viable axion parameter space to be explored. The methods used to date will be inefficient to perform such a challenging task. Here our DarkQuantum consortium proposes a new way of addressing this gap using quantum sensing technologies and hybrid quantum systems. Specifically, we will combine quantum technologies and well established particle physics environments at CERN or DESY devoted to the detection of axions in the galactic halo. Building quantum-enhanced setups in particle physics environments is extremely challenging and needs expertise from very different fields of physics. Our consortium brings together experts from quantum circuits, very-low temperature cryogenics, quantum measurements and particle physics, to build two quantum-enhanced haloscopes with unprecedented sensitivity and mass scanning range. The novel sensing strategies of the DarkQuantum project could lead to the experimental detection of axions for the first time. Such a fundamental discovery in connection with the long-standing DM problem would lead to a breakthrough in Physics

Mots-clés : axions dark matter axion haloscope axion like particle photon counter qubit transmon high temperature superconductor low background techniques underground physics machine learning
Projet ERC : T-SECTOR (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : CO-PI
Acronyme de l'entité : IFM-GEOMAR
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 11475220.0 €

A central problem of understanding the Earth system is quantifying climate-solid Earth feedback that requires time-series studies. One important time series is the climate (sea level) record that shows transitions between ice ages and warm periods for the last millions of years, involving vast mass transfer between continents (ice load) and oceans. Volcanism is sensitive to such pressure changes, but its response to glacial cycles is largely unknown for the global mid-ocean-ridge (MOR) system, where 80% of Earth’s volcanism occurs. Models of MOR response to sealevel fluctuations predict changes in crustal thickness, chemistry of lavas and hydrothermal activity. Establishing high-resolution time series on MORs, however, has previously not been possible, because the sea floor is rapidly covered by sediment as it moves away from the MOR and thus cannot be directly sampled. Recent studies, however, show MOR eruptions deposit samples of lava as glass on nearby sediments for up to 100 ka. These carbonate-rich sediments can be precisely dated by oxygen isotope stratigraphy and provide an archive of ridge eruptions (glasses) and hydrothermal activity (trace metals) in the sediments that can be sampled by gravity coring. Through closely spaced new cores to be retrieved during multiple research cruises, a high-resolution time series of volcanism and hydrothermal activity can be achieved and directly linked to the climate record, whereas seismic techniques can be used to determine variations in crustal thickness over time. We propose to obtain integrated data sets for all these processes from slow, intermediate and fast spreading ridge segments over the past 1.5 Ma in unprecedented detail. The results of these glass, sediment and crustal thickness time series will allow us to unequivocally test the influence of glacial cycles on MOR processes and will provide the first high-resolution time series of ocean ridge magmatism, opening up a new frontier of scientific exploration.

Mots-clés : paleoceanography,hydrothermalism
Projet ERC : BlackHolistic (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université de Turku — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 299664.0 €

Black holes (BHs) are icons of the fundamental nature of gravity, the mysterious force shaping the Universe. They are also the Universe’s most efficient power houses, turning infalling gas into energy and outflows that, together with gravity, mould galaxies and thus ultimately stars and planets. The first image of a black hole by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), wherein we played a leading role, captured the imagination of scientists and the public alike. This picture of the immutable black hole is however blurred by the dynamic, still mysterious behaviour of the surrounding gas. Our limited understanding of these turbulent, magnetised plasma in/outflows, producing the radiation and high-energy particles we observe, obstructs a straightforward interpretation of the black hole image for testing theories of gravity. The challenge in understanding the astrophysics of black holes and their impact on the cosmos is that they span >8 orders of magnitude in mass, size and timescales, and emit light over 15 orders of magnitude in frequency. Our new approach overcomes this scale separation, by simultaneously addressing the dynamics of large and small black holes, in colour. We produce for the first time high-resolution multi-colour movies with the EHT combined with new telescopes probing the variable extremes of the electromagnetic spectrum (e.g., CTA, MeerKAT/SKA1). The data are analysed and interpreted with innovative models finally combining micro- and macrophysics. The PIs bring together complementary expertise over the entire black hole mass scale in radio imaging and multi-wavelength monitoring, astroparticle physics, and theoretical modelling to bear on the problem. This is accompanied by four major investments: construction of a new mm-wave telescope in Africa enabling full dynamical imaging of black holes with the EHT, new model development, supercomputing hardware, and a vibrant team of young scientists to help develop a new, truly universal black hole paradigm.

Mots-clés : black holes,event horizon telescope,radio astronomy,vlbi,grmhd simulations
Projet ERC : Cat4CanCenter (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université de Leyde — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3592816.5 €

The increased incidence and mortality of tumors that do not respond to standard of care or other targeted therapies is a major challenge in clinical management of these cancer patients. In order to provide innovative therapeutic avenues for treatment refractory patients, it is urgent to develop novel mechanisms of anticancer drugs mode of action that will overcome the drawbacks of current therapies. In Cat4CanCenter, we will merge the research fields of metal-based catalysis for drug development and innovative delivery routes with cancer biology and immunology, applied to one of the deadliest cancers, glioblastoma (GBM), a fatal primary brain tumor for which no curing therapy exists, due to its location within the brain parenchyma and complex tumor microenvironment. Many potential drugs failed in the clinic due to their inherent toxicity and off-target side-effects, which add up to the challenges in reaching the protected brain site. Recently, innovative catalyst design enabled synthetic transformations in the presence of biological molecules. In Cat4CanCenter we will develop four innovative approaches to treat GBM. This new methodology requires the design of cage protected catalysts that will be delivered to targeted cell types using advanced lipid nanoparticle technology. Next, the catalysts will convert nontoxic prodrugs into active drugs within the GBM bulk. Our groundbreaking strategy aims for successful therapies to treat glioblastoma, by developing complementary approaches to therapeutically tackle the complexity of this disease. The new strategies, catalysts and prodrIn this project we explore a new avenue to treat glioblastoma, which is the most difficult cancer to target. In a collaborative program we develop biomimetic transition metal catalysts (key expertise 1) that will be delivered using smart strategies such as lipid nanoparticles (key expertise 2) to generate cancer drug in vivo. The glioblastoma biology will be studies in detail (key expertise 3).

Mots-clés : supramolecular cage catalysis transition metal catalysis glioblastoma tumor micro environment
Projet ERC : MEDGREENREV (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université autonome de Barcelone — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : CO-PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2251502.31 €

As Mediterranean societies prepare for the impacts of climate change over the next few decades, a case study to inform their future resilience is associated with one of the defining events in world history: the emergence of Islam in the 7th century, the subsequent Arab (and later Berber) conquests of the southern and western Mediterranean, their associated population movements and the environmental adaptations that enabled these new societies to flourish. The introduction of new forms of agriculture that transformed the economies of the conquered regions has been previously framed as the “Green Revolution”. Moving beyond the limited focus of earlier research, with its restricted spatial and chronological scope, this project will adopt an integrated ecological approach, encompassing plants, animals and soils, from production through to consumption, and compare the impact and legacy of environmental transformations associated with long-term societal change in the western Mediterranean (Iberia and Morocco), beyond the initial Arab/Berber conquests. Adopting a broader chronological span, from the century before the conquests through to the century after the dissolution of the last Islamic polity in Iberia, the transition from Islamic to Christian regimes in Iberia will be compared, for the first time, with the persistence of Islamic polities in northwest Africa, against the backdrop of climatic fluctuations. This will enable relationships between environmental transformations and sequences of political and demographic change to be effectively contextualised. The synergy between our groups will combine regional specialisms with a wealth of scientific expertise, enabling us to conduct the first long-term and inter-regional study of how conquest, migration and encounters with resident populations and landscapes drove environmental transformation in the western Mediterranean during this formative period in world history.

Mots-clés : geoarchaeology,zooarchaeology,archaeobotany,palynology,gis,multiculturalism,state formation,mediterranean,iberia,north africa,longue dur e,arab conquest,medieval green revolution
Projet ERC : UNLEASH (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Helmholtz Zentrum München — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HMGU
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Alternative splicing (AS) of mRNA precursors plays important roles in tissue-specific gene regulation and biological regulatory mechanisms, as it can radically alter protein expression, cell phenotypes and physiological responses. Altered splicing also contributes to disease mechanisms, ranging from neurodegeneration to cancer. Drugs modulating AS have recently provided the first therapy for Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a common genetic disorder, illustrating the huge potential for treating many other diseases of unmet need, if only we understood the mechanisms controlling splice site selection and how to regulate them with small molecules. Unfortunately, despite decades of research, a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms that control specificity of AS is lacking. This gap in basic knowledge prevents opportunities to harness splicing modulators as tools to study gene function, novel therapeutics or other biotech applications. This Project addresses head-on the major technical challenges that have limited progress in the AS field. Building on extensive preliminary data, we will use a multidisciplinary approach that combines chemical, structural, cellular, systems biology and machine learning to characterize mechanisms of splice site selection and identify targets for modulating these mechanisms using tool compounds. The outcomes will define key regulatory sequences, splicing factors and molecular interactions involved, thereby illuminating how the splicing machinery efficiently accommodates, yet also discriminates between, a wide range of splice site sequences. This will enable future applications harnessing splice site selection. Our primary goal is to answer the central question, ‘Is it generally possible to modulate splicing with high specificity using small molecules?’ Success will transform our basic understanding of human gene expression and unleash major opportunities for Pharma to develop new therapeutics.

Mots-clés : rna splicing,rna protein interactions