Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : MULTraSonicA (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : National Institute of Chemistry — Pays : Slovénie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : NIC;KI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1535500.0 €

Ultrasound-guided drug and gene delivery (USDG) enables controlled and spatially precise delivery of drugs and macromolecules, encapsulated in microbubbles (MBs) and submicron gas vesicles (GVs), to target areas such as cancer tumors. It is a non-invasive, high precision, low toxicity process with drastically reduced drug dosage. These advantages open doors to numerous biomedical applications, from sonothrombolysis to blood–brain barrier opening. However, the progress and deployment of this technology is subject to extensive experimentation and heuristics. The proposal aims to develop a virtual environment to quantify and optimize USDG and in particular the MBs and GVs utilized as drug carriers and contrast agents. Their type and concentration, and interface with ultrasound (US) are critical to the success and efficiency of USDG. State-of-the-art USDG systems operate in a narrow range of empirically-tuned US parameters. This empiricism entails severe risks and limitations for clinical applications and delays the adoption of this potent technology. I propose a computational framework that would allow for controlled testing, data-driven quantification of uncertainties, and a rational optimization of experimental US parameters. The framework will rely on submicron resolution modeling and simulation of cavitating MBs and GVs interacting with US. Limitations of existing models based on continuum theory preclude an accurate description of cavitation, drastically degrading the prediction of drug delivery outcomes. I will develop new, data-informed mesoscopic models of US contrast agents, capturing their rheological and acoustic behavior. Specific interactions of US and agents at a submicron level will be included by harnessing novel multiscale methods that enable seamless propagation of US from the macro to microscopic level. The proposed framework will be integrated with experimental efforts to advance USDG across biomedical applications.

Mots-clés : pacs2010  02 70 ns molecular dynamics and particle methods,43 35  c ultrasonics,quantum acoustics,and physical effects of sound,43 35 wa biological effects of ultrasound,ultrasonic tomography,43 40 ey vibrations of shells,43 40 ng effects of vibration and shock on biological systems
Projet ERC : ImmortaSTEM (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : University of Nottingham — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 149932.0 €

Under an ERC Advanced Grant, and subsequent PoC grant, Professor Shakesheff's team have invented a new intracellular delivery system that overcomes a problem in drug delivery in stem cell culture as well as regenerative medicine and other therapeutic approaches. The system, called GAG-binding enhanced transduction (GET), enables intracellular delivery of proteins, nucleic acids and particles into cells that resist other non-viral strategies. The work under ERC Advanced Grant and PoC funding has allowed exemplification of the delivery of proteins that promote pluripotency or differentiation, and delivery and expression of mRNA This ImmortaSTEM: Proof-of-Concept Application will achieve 7 deliverables that together will generate a robust business plan for commercialisation of a specific application of GET to aid cell therapy attempts. This is a unique approach allowing expansion of a patient’s own cells as a therapy. We will begin by performing a comprehensive market analysis to test our view that GET could be used to expand valuable cells presently defined as challenging or impossible. Next we take account of the market analysis to refine our technical work resulting in a report that provides robust evidence of market required advantages of GET over competitor products for stem cell expansion. This technical work will include a consideration of manufacturing routes and costs of goods. In parallel with the technical work we will commission an independent freedom-to-operate report. Finally, we will initiate confidential discussions with potential partners and customers via face-to-face meetings in Europe and the US. The final business plan will establish the technical and commercial feasibility of our approaches in one or more of our target markets. We envisage that at the end of the ERC PoC grant we will attract substantial funding to rapidly progress product launches and licenses with significant impact on the regenerative medicine and cell therapy sectors.

Mots-clés : regenerative medicine,immortalisation,intracellular delivery,protein therapeutics,nucleic acids,nanoparticles
Projet ERC : MMUSCLES (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : Autonomous University of Madrid — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UAM
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499500.0 €

Understanding and controlling the properties of matter is one of the overarching goals of modern science. A powerful way to achieve is this by using light, usually in the form of intense laser beams. However, modern advances in nanophotonics allow us to confine light modes so strongly that their effect on matter is felt even when no external fields are present. In this regime of “strong coupling” or “vacuum Rabi splitting”, the fundamental excitations of the coupled system are hybrid light-matter states which combine the properties of both constituents, so-called polaritons. Little attention has been paid to the fact that strong coupling can also affect internal structure, such as nuclear motion in molecules. First experimental indications for this effect have been found, but current theory cannot explain or predict such changes. We will thus develop theoretical methods that can treat the modification of molecular structure under strong coupling to confined light modes. This will require advances in the microscopic description of the molecules under strong coupling by explicitly including their rovibrational degrees of freedom, as well as techniques to incorporate the influence of these modes in the macroscopic setting of collective strong coupling. In order to achieve this, we will adapt well-known techniques from quantum chemistry and combine them with the concepts of polariton physics. We will investigate what level of control can be gained through this approach, and whether confined light modes could act as a “photonic catalyst” to control molecular dynamics without requiring an active ingredient. This could present a novel tool to control photochemical reactions that are of paramount importance in the biological mechanisms of vision and photosynthesis, and hold great interest for use in memories, photoswitching devices, light-driven actuators, or solar energy storage. Consequently, this work could have wide-ranging impact on many different fields of science.

Mots-clés : strong coupling,polaritons,plasmonics,molecular control
Projet ERC : PLAMO (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe sciences
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 : 1261336.0 €

Understanding better planet- and moon-formation is a key to comprehend how planetary systems – including our own – came to be. To study these processes, we need computer simulations of their birth nests, the disks around the young stars (circumstellar disks) where planets are born; and disks around forming planets (circumplanetary disks) where moons assemble. Circumplanetary disks are located within the circumstellar disks and they were first detected observationally in June 2019, after twenty years of numerical simulations predicting their existence. Therefore, it is very timely to study their characteristics. Circumplanetary disks have three main roles. Firstly, the are channelling material to the forming planets, hence they regulate the formation timescale and the final planetary mass. Secondly, they are the birth-place for moons to grow. Thirdly, they surround and embed the forming planet, hence affect the observational appearance of forming planets. Developing state-of-the-art gas-dust thermo-hydrodynamical simulations, combining them with radiative transfer, N-body simulations, and for the first time with machine learning, offers a completely new window to reveal how planet- and moon-formation takes place. The three scientific projects of this proposal are: I. Understanding the thermo-hydrodynamical effects on planetary growth, on the formation timescale at different locations of the circumstellar disk, and hence the diversity of the final planetary masses. II. Observational predictions of forming planets from the simulations – which instrument can be used to detect them, what information can be gained from these observations, and what are the general characteristics of circumstellar disks determined with machine learning. III. Studying moon-formation in the circumplanetary disk, provide predictions of how the exomoon population looks like, and what fraction of exomoons is detectable with current and near-future instrumentation.

Mots-clés : planet formation,moon formation,hydrodynamics,radiative transfer,machine learning
Projet ERC : ModelGenomLand (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : University of Edinburgh — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1497755.0 €

Understanding how natural selection, random genetic drift and demographic events interact to generate and maintain genetic and species diversity has been the central focus of population genetics for many decades. We now have the necessary genome sequence data to make detailed and powerful inferences about the evolutionary past of populations and species, yet our ability to meaningfully interpret such data has remained fundamentally limited. This project will use a combination of theory, development of new inference tools and a large-scale comparative analyses of genome data and has two principal aims: First to develop a general, statistical framework for making inferences about the joint action of past selection and demography from genome sequence data. This will be achieved using analytic calculations and approximations for the joint distribution of linked polymorphic sites. We will use these results to develop new methods to quantify the genome-wide rates of positive and background selection and to scan for genomic outliers of divergence between and positive selection within species. The new methods will be tested using simulations and data from model insects (Drosophila and Heliconius). Second, we will apply the new inference approach to genome data for 20 species pairs of European butterflies and conduct a systematic comparison of the demographic and selective forces involved in speciation. This will reveal how repeatable speciation processes are both in terms of the demographic and selective events, and the genes and genomic architectures involved. Specifically, we will test whether selection during speciation is concentrated at chromosomal rearrangements and/or candidate gene families involved in mate recognition and host plant adaptation. This project will fundamentally improve both our understanding of speciation and selection and our ability to use sequence data to study population processes (be they selection, demography or both) in any system.

Mots-clés : theoretical population genetics,speciation
Projet ERC : InterAct (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Friedrich Miescher Institute — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : FMI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2427500.0 €

Understanding how neuronal circuits regulate the enormous repertoire of movements is a key outstanding question in neuroscience. Neurons contributing to execution and learning of body movements are distributed throughout the nervous system. Control of body movements entails the engagement of connected brain motor centers to generate action commands, providing instructions for execution to the spinal cord. The brainstem as focus of this proposal represents an essential intermediary between upper planning and spinal executive motor circuits. Recent technological advances have led to the identification of brainstem neurons regulating diverse forms of body movement, including locomotion and skilled forelimb movements, both engaging limbs but for very distinct purposes. The goal of this project is to understand how brainstem populations involved in specific body movements are endowed with their behavior-specific fingerprints through interactions within the broader motor system. We aim to determine how key synaptic inputs to specific brainstem neurons shape their activity patterns in synchrony with the regulated behavior. We hypothesize that the emergence of action-specific neuronal ensembles in the brainstem requires control by their driver, gating and modulatory elements, with the function to promote the recruitment of specific brainstem neurons during desired actions and to suppress them when no or alternative actions are planned. We build on our know-how on brainstem neurons and use sophisticated combinatorial viral-genetic targeting strategies, state of the art neuronal recording and activity-pattern modifying technologies, combined with precise quantitative behavioral readouts in mice to address this question. Together, our project will elucidate circuit mechanisms by which brainstem neurons interact in the motor system to control the generation of body movements, thereby uncovering principles of how the nervous system generates diverse actions.

Mots-clés : motor system,neuronal control of movement,neuronal circuits and populations,brainstem,basal ganglia,cortex,spinal cord,mouse genetics,virus tracing,behaviour
Projet ERC : EngineeringPercepts (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Max Planck Society — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : MPG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 281000.0 €

Understanding how the brain is able to transform sensory input into decisions is one of the major challenges of systems neuroscience. While recording/imaging during sensory-motor tasks identified neural substrates of sensation and action in various cortical areas, the crucial questions of 1) how these correlates are implemented within the underlying neural networks and 2) how their output triggers decisions, will only be answered when the individual functional measurements are integrated into a coherent model of all task-related circuits. The goal of my proposal is to use the rodent vibrissal system for building such a model in the context of how a tactile-mediated percept is encoded by the interplay between biophysical, cellular and network mechanisms. Specifically, rodents decide to cross a gap when detecting its far side with a single facial whisker. This suggests that whisker contact with the platform, if synchronized with an internal motor signal, triggers the decision. My key hypothesis is that in sensory cortex layer 5 thick-tufted (L5tt) neurons receive touch and motor information via specific pathways that target basal and apical tuft dendrites, respectively. When localizing the far side of the gap, the two inputs coincide and result in burst spiking output to (sub)cortical areas, triggering the gap cross. To test this hypothesis, I will determine all sensory/motor-related local and long-range inputs/outputs to/from L5tt neurons, measure whisker-evoked responses of these populations and use the data to constrain network simulations of active whisker touch. Using a multidisciplinary approach, combining in vivo electrophysiology, virus injections, custom imaging/reconstruction tools and Monte Carlo simulations, my reverse engineering strategy will provide unmatched mechanistic insight to perceptual decision making and will function as a show case – generalizable across sensory modalities and species – of how to derive computations that underlie behavior.

Mots-clés : gap cross behavior,barrel cortex,connectome,monte carlo simulations,coincidence detection
Projet ERC : SOCIAL ROBOTS (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : Bangor University — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : BU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 185732.0 €

Understanding how we perceive and interact with others is a core challenge of social cognition research. This challenge is poised to intensify in importance as the ubiquity of artificial intelligence and the presence of humanoid robots in society grows. By innovatively combining psychology, neuroscience and robotics, the SOCIAL ROBOTS project helps prepare us for this future by (1) establishing a new approach for understanding how the human brain processes and responds to interactive robots; (2) delineating the factors influencing how representations of robots and humans are shared at brain and behavioural levels; and (3) exploring how these findings inform the now-rapid development of social robots. To achieve this, we first investigate how young adults perceive and interact with humans vs. robots, the role of physical features and training experience, and the extent to which brain regions mediating social interaction with humans also support robot interaction. Next, to test the role of experience-dependent plasticity on social cognition, we assess how brain and behavioural flexibility toward robots manifests among young children and older adults. Finally, we explore cultural influences on shared representations of humans and robots by extending the first project phase to Japan, the world’s most robotics-rich nation. The SOCIAL ROBOTS project tests a dominant hypothesis of social cognition and is expected to lead to a novel conception of the neurocognitive architecture supporting human-robot interaction. Neuroimaging and behavioural measures will offer detailed and nuanced insights into how brain mechanisms supporting social engagement with people are used when interacting with robots, and how different kinds of experience (e.g., training, lifespan, cultural) influence such engagement. The planned studies and those generated during the project will enable the SOCIAL ROBOTS team to become a world-leading group bridging social cognition, neuroscience and robotics.

Mots-clés : social brain,fmri,development,aging,cross cultural,japan
Projet ERC : FOXON (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Technical University of Darmstadt — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1758600.0 €

Understanding oxygen dynamics is a key to superior device performance in emergent oxide electronics. So far it is an unrealized dream to correlate electrical behavior and atomic structure during device operation. Here, I envision bridging the gap between theoretical models and experimental reality. Recent advances in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) chips for in situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) are opening exciting new avenues in nanoscale research. The capability to perform current-voltage measurements while simultaneously analyzing the corresponding structural, chemical or even electronic structure changes during the operation of an electronic device would be a major breakthrough for nanoelectronics. Controlled electric field studies would enable an unprecedented way to investigate metal-oxide functional devices by using a lab-on-a-chip approach. I propose this project based upon own groundbreaking work on (i) how to electrically contact and operate an electron transparent lamella device fabricated from a metal-insulator-metal (MIM) structure (Ultramicroscopy 181 (2017) 144-149) and (ii) the design of a novel MEMS-based chip for in situ electrical biasing. FOXON will provide a platform for atomic scale operando investigations of oxide thin film and interface switching phenomena of MIM devices under electrical bias inside a microscope. My scientific endeavor will establish a group to develop beyond state-of-the-art operando TEM of MIM structured devices and tackle open questions in the field of oxide electronics. My scientific mission incorporates (a) studies of switching processes in oxide devices and (b) a comprehensive understanding of the atomic-level mechanisms that lead to tunable physical properties including dynamics of oxygen vacancies and stability of quantized conductance states in RRAM devices (Adv. Funct. Mater. (2017) 1700432). The results from this ERC Starting Grant could pave the way for novel quantum and information technologies.

Mots-clés : structure properties relations,functional materials,electronic devices,operando nanoscopy,metal insulator metal structures
Projet ERC : THEIA (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
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 : 1448493.0 €

Understanding planetary core flows is crucial as they generate planetary magnetic fields and modify planetary rotation. However, their study is an outstanding challenge involving geomagnetism, geodesy and fluid mechanics. Notably, present models fail to explain two puzzling observations. First, geodesy constrains the Earth and Moon core dissipations to values exceeding those of current theoretical models. Second, lunar paleomagnetism gives an early Moon magnetic field too intense for the current planetary dynamo paradigm, based on convection. My project tackles these issues by going beyond the present planetary core simulations, performed in exact spheres. Planetary core boundaries are actually not spherical, being affected by large-scale and small-scale deformations. This topography, although advocated for a long time to play a role for the core dynamics, has been largely overlooked in core flow models. I propose to investigate topographic effects in planetary fluid cores by combining theory, numerics and experiments. Using the largest turntable worldwide, I will build an experiment to study the dissipation of turbulent flows in the presence of rotation, density variations and topography. Building upon my recent advances in applied mathematics, I will develop new numerical models keeping only the relevant topographic effects. Using efficient spectral methods, I will reach unprecedented parameters, closer to planetary ones. Developing scaling laws, I will assess how planetary core dissipations and magnetic fields are modified by topographic effects. Beyond the Earth-Moon system, my models will also apply to fluid layers of other bodies, such as the subsurface oceans of the Jupiter icy moons, studied by future spatial missions (JUICE, Europa Clipper). This project is especially timely as the liquid core of Mars is studied by the on-going spatial mission InSight.

Mots-clés : rotating fluids,earth and moon s rotation,past lunar dynamo