Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : PROFI (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Institut de Chimie — Pays : Slovénie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

We live in an era of profound excitement for synthetic biology, which is providing insights into the underlying mechanisms of living systems and powerful tools to modify biological and biomimetic systems using innovative design principles. Regulation of protein function based on the recognition of other molecules or environmental conditions is fundamental to all living systems. My vision and the strategic objectives of the project are to develop a modular platform that imparts proteins with the ability to sense diverse signals, thus enabling the regulation of their function and the introduction of novel properties into biological systems. This project aims to explore unique opportunities for regulating protein function through insertions, leveraging modular building blocks with well-known and tunable properties. By combining these building blocks in innovative ways, proteins and biological systems will be engineered to respond to biological, chemical, and physical signals. The specific objectives of the project encompass: 1) design protein responsiveness to pH and RNA molecules, generating RNA sensors and regulating protein function based on cell type- or state-specific RNA molecules; 2) enable proteins to sense the concentration of other proteins, creating concentration-dependent regulatory circuits with a demonstration of biomedical application; 3) construct de novo mechano-responsive proteins, to prepare genetically encoded mechanosensors tolerant to high forces and mechanoresponsive designs of CAR for cancer immunotherapy and 4), design new protein regulators with favorable in vivo properties and regulators of natural proteins. Through several compelling examples in mammalian cells, this project aims to demonstrate the transformative potential of endowing proteins with unique and previously unknown properties, advancing the engineering of biological systems and paving the way for potential therapeutic applications in the field of biomedicine.

Mots-clés : engineered responsive proteins,rna sensing proteins,mechanoresponsive proteins,cancer immunotherapy,mammalian cells,synthetic biology,therapeutic molecular devices
Projet ERC : CRISPOL (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 587500.0 €

CRISPOL analyzes the systemic impact of crises on democratic policy-making. The fact that crises have turned into ordinary rather than exceptional phenomena in modern democracies may not only erode trust in government. Crises also spawn additional crises. Because crisis responses absorb governmental attention, problems in policy areas not affected by crises might be neglected. This can in turn lead to the escalation of neglected issues into full-blown crises, thus increasing the burden on governments to manage an ever-growing number of crises. Crises might thus trigger a vicious cycle that un-dermines democratic legitimacy. It is the central objective of CRISPOL to study systemic trade-offs in policy change across sectors re-sulting from crisis events both theoretically and empirically.  (1) CRISPOL maps crises across policy areas, countries and over time. It provides an encompassing long-term mapping of crisis events across different policy sectors and countries. The project captures all crisis events across six policy areas for 23 OECD countries over a period of 50 years. (2) CRISPOL analyzes cross-sectoral trade-offs in crisis-induced dynamics of policy change. Can we observe crowding-out effects, with radical departures of the status quo in ‘crisis-proximate’ areas com-ing at the expense of policy inertia in more ‘crisis-remote’ ones? (3) CRISPOL analyzes cross-temporal trade-offs in change dynamics: Are neglected policy sectors catching up when the crisis is over; i.e., is policy inertia during crisis times offset by more dynamic change in post-crisis-periods? Or do crises have enduring consequences for change dynamics in crisis-remote sectors? (4) CRISPOL investigates whether cross-sectoral and cross-temporal trade-offs vary across countries. Do certain countries possess a greater capacity to handle crises while simultaneously addressing other policy areas, and which factors contribute to this ability?

Mots-clés : public policy,policy change,crises
Projet ERC : EcoEvoRescue (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Université norvégienne de sciences et de technologie — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Here I will establish eco-evolutionary rescue analyses as a predictive science. I will do this by developing theories, principles and tools for assessing whether populations can cope with changes in the environment at both short (ecological) and long (evolutionary) timescales. I contend that analyses involving the capacity of organisms to adapt to environmental changes must be based on theories including realistic ecological assumptions. My aim is therefore to develop a common theoretical framework for analyses of eco-evolutionary dynamics that includes basic features that characterize almost all natural populations, such as stochastic fluctuations in population size, density-dependent feedback mechanisms and dispersal among geographically separate populations. I will be able to achieve this ambitious goal because I have recently been involved in developing a new set of theories that have identified novel quantities based on general ecological characteristics that eco-evolutionary processes tend to maximize. These provide objective measures of a population’s capacity to change, which can be used to assess the consequences of habitat loss and changes in environment variation such as those expected due to climate change. I will be able to parameterize these models via my access to one of the largest individual-based long-term field studies of any vertebrate species including data of more than 36000 individual house sparrows from 18 populations on islands within a large geographical area of northern Norway, which will enable me to quantify processes rarely analysed before in natural populations. A central focus will be to derive new metrics that describe how the degree of persistence of a population to environmental change depends upon its size and population dynamic characteristics. Thus, this project will provide operationalization of eco-evolutionary rescue analyses as a research field for assessment of the vulnerability of species to global changes.

Mots-clés : quantitative genetics,conservation biology
Projet ERC : WORK-IT (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université d'Helsinki — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499994.0 €

How does human work structure the economy and society? Temples in the Southern Levant during the Persian Empire (c. 539–331 BCE) provide a vital, underutilized historical vista for such questions. Persian involvement with labor taxation, forced labor, and temple institutions makes temples cynosures for key ancient economic, social, and cultural practices of work. Focusing on taxation and labor, WORK-IT drags analysis from formal to informal taxation (from official to social structures) and from slavery to forced labor (from definition to wider social phenomena), seeking deeper social interrelations for both economic topics. Both interventions furnish new fruitful perspectives on the dialectical interrelations between economy and society. Bourdieu's field theory brings powerful tools for wider socio-economic implications that integrates practices with perceptions. WORK-IT will harness eight types of evidence for temple institutions—building, gifts, taxes, tithes, produce, welfare, priesthoods, and dependents—using sources from the Southern Levant, the Persian imperial heartland, and the wider Ancient Near East. Each source will be analyzed via informal taxation, forced labor, and Bourdieusian field analysis to understand taxation, labor, and their interrelations within ancient weak states (pre-industrial, pre-nation-state polities). These analyses will highlight flaws in modern socio-economic assumptions that have hampered scholarly judgments of socio-economic relations in the Ancient Near East and thus in modern socio-economic narratives. WORK-IT will yield a more sophisticated understanding of the social impact of ancient temple institutions, the unintended consequences of local-imperial socio-economic interrelations, and a deeper historical perspective on pre-industrial societies. Ultimately, WORK-IT aims to re-integrate the Ancient Near East into socio-economic theory, forging a longer durée, pre-industrial perspective on society and economics.

Mots-clés : achaemenid persian empire,southern levant,informal taxation,forced labor,bourdieu,temple institutions,imperial local interactions,ancient near east,persian period judaism
Projet ERC : Si3 (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Istituto nazionale di fisica nucleare — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : INFN
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 500000.0 €

This project aims to design, construct, and evaluate a novel instrument for molecular imaging of radioactive nuclides in the human body. The hypothesis is that, by using next-generation silicon sensors to measure each photon interaction and applying kinematic constraints, the incident photon direction can be calculated. Thus, we can remove state-of-the-art mechanical collimators. The main objective of this project is to explore the physical limits of efficiency and spatial resolution and evaluate the concept for this new technology in medical imaging applications.  The new instrument should improve detector efficiency by about a factor of one million, reducing examination time from an hour to less than a second. The concept aims to overcome Compton cameras' shortcomings such as complicated geometries with low efficiency, that, despite several attempts, prevented this technique from going beyond an early prototype stage. The new sensor concept consists of a massive block of silicon built up from a multitude of sensors, with high resolution in space, energy and time and including signal shaping and data processing. The system will have orders of magnitude more read-out pixels than ever before in medical imaging. The system design and image reconstruction process are conceptually challenging, addressing several scientific problems at the component level such as pixel charge collection and capacitance, but also including image reconstruction from fragments of event circles, combinatorial problems involved with tracing each event to discern the correct order of interactions and to reject background events. Over a 10–20-year period, the technology could replace the current installed base, leading to significant impacts on adjacent research fields, such as drug development and targeted radionuclide therapy.

Mots-clés : molecular imaging,spect,single photon emission computed tomography,radiopharmaceuticals,targeted radionuclide therapy,compton camera,compton imaging,silicon sensors,photon counting,nuclear medicine,nuclear imaging
Projet ERC : MECHSYS (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Université Heinrich Heine de Düsseldorf — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1711101.0 €

A major goal of evolutionary biology is to reconstruct evolutionary trajectories and outcomes from mechanistic descriptions of the interactions between organisms and their environment. This goal is rarely reached due to the complexity of these interactions and their effects on fitness. Recent advances in computer technology that facilitate the solution and optimization of large mathematical systems have now brought such models into reach. In MECHSYS, I propose to develop a computational framework that builds on biochemical and physical principles to reconstruct how the interaction of the environment with plant anatomy, water transport, photosynthesis, and metabolism shapes plant physiology and fitness. Mathematically, the model comprises thermal balances as well as the balances of metabolites and water in different plant organs and in the compartments of leaf cells, using net CO2 fixation per root area over multiple days as a proxy for fitness. For a given climate and soil, the model will estimate fitness based on anatomical parameters and on systems-level protein concentrations and enzyme regulation. These estimates will allow us to rationalize the evolution and/or predominance of different types of plants in specific habitats. We will validate the model against proteomics and metabolomics data from representatives of C3 plants and the much more water use efficient CAM plants, covering desert plants as well as epiphytes. Moreover, we will simulate evolutionary trajectories towards CAM photosynthesis and succulence, two traits whose evolution appears to be interlinked. Finally, we will utilize the model to propose optimal strategies for engineering crops to become more drought-resistant in increasingly hotter and drier climates. Overall, MECHSYS will establish, test, and apply a ground-breaking, mechanistic systems modelling framework for evolutionary plant biology, which will allow deep insights into the selective forces that shape plant physiology and evolution.

Mots-clés : plant evolution cam photosynthesis c3 photosynthesis succulence water transport evolutionary systems biology integrated modelling ode systems
Projet ERC : OA-CONNECT (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : KU Leuven — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3283437.0 €

Osteoarthritis (OA), a degenerative joint disease, debilitates the lives of 242 million people globally but remains without a cure. The knee joint is most frequently affected, causing pain, loss of joint function, and reduced quality of life. OA-CONNECT instigates an innovative approach to understanding the fundamental cause of OA by posing a question that could previously never be answered: ‘What causes mechanical loads to switch from supporting to disrupting cartilage health in OA?’ OA-CONNECT introduces a unique, integrated approach CONNECT-ing joint function to chondrocyte biology to unravel the OA Mechanome, the maladaptive dynamic interplay of mechanical and biological drivers of OA cartilage degeneration across cellular-, tissue- and joint- scales by: (1) Connecting the spatial mechanical and cell molecular dynamics underlying OA cartilage adaptation to loading, using multimodal read-outs from spatial omics, functional microscopy, and high-field MRI. (2) Predicting cartilage degeneration by connecting knee joint cartilage loads during movement to local cellular mechanobiological processes, using a multi-scale mechanobiology-inspired adaptive modeling framework informed by datasets of (1). (3) Elucidating cartilage degeneration probability and mechanotherapy success in subjects with early knee OA, integrating the multi-scale model of (2) with machine learning, multi-variate and population-based methods leveraging the use of clinically accessible ‘real-world’ data. Prospective cohort and proof-of-concept studies will capture the dynamics of mechanical and biological drivers and the impact of three current mechanotherapies. The field of OA needs a shift in focus as the approaches of the past 20 years could not bring the mechanistic insights required to develop treatment strategies. By dissecting the Goldilocks problem of mechanical load, OA-CONNECT will initiate a groundbreaking shift in unraveling mechanobiological drivers in an uncharted direction.

Mots-clés : computational biomechanics,biomedical engineering,cartilage mechanobiology,musculoskeletal rehabilitation,multi scale modeling,osteoarthritis,functional biomarkers
Projet ERC : TerraVirtualE (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
Entité participante : KU Leuven — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 518233.21 €

The question about how solar storms impact a planet has both fundamental scientific importance and great social impacts for protecting our infrastructure from the most powerful solar storms. At present, models rely on a fluid description of the electrons due to algorithmic and computational challenges. Our goal is to develop a model of the space environment around a planet based on a particle description of both ions and electrons. We plan to use the particle in cell (PIC) model where both ions and electrons retain their nature as particles. This PIC model will allow us to investigate the critical role of energetic electrons participating in the energy and matter transfer from the solar wind to the planet inner space. What makes this goal now possible is the Energy Conserving semi implicit method (ECsim), developed by the PI. The ECsim conserves energy exactly, a critical element in the investigation of energy flow from the solar wind. In addition, the energy conservation leads to enhanced numerical stability, which in turn greatly augment ECsim’s capability to simulate very large systems such as planet atmospheres while treating electrons as particles rather than fluid. We will start from this new development and introduce two critical innovations. First, we will implement adaptive spatial and temporal resolution for finer resolution closer to the planet and in selected areas of interest. Second, we will implement CPU-GPU algorithms for the new heterogeneous supercomputers developed by EuroHPC. These innovations will increase the capability of ECsim by more than an order of magnitude making it possible to model a region as big as the Earth space environment with the computers available within the next 3-5 years. If successful, we will have the first PIC model to describe a planetary space environment where the correct particle nature of the electrons is considered with all its implication for the energy and matter transport.

Mots-clés : space weather,planetary space environment,heterogeneous supercomputers
Projet ERC : AdrenalWeakness (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : KU Leuven — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499750.0 €

Sepsis, complicated surgery or extensive trauma cause hyperinflammation-induced critical illness which requires vital organ support in an intensive care unit (ICU) in order to avoid imminent death. Although modern intensive care has reduced mortality, a large number of survivors continue to require such supportive care in the ICU sometimes for weeks or months. Once in this prolonged phase, typical ICU-acquired morbidities such as lingering organ failure, muscle wasting and weakness and vasopressor- and ventilator-dependency become the main drivers of poor short- and long-term outcome irrespective of the initial diagnosis upon admission. Research from our group has focused on two of these unresolved problems, namely ICU-acquired muscle weakness and ICU-acquired adrenal insufficiency, for which there is either no treatment or treatment has deleterious off-target effects that may fuel a vicious circle impairing short- and long-term recovery. Today, intensivists see these conditions as two separate pathophysiological entities, an assumption we think is false. We hypothesize that ICU-acquired adrenal insufficiency shares upstream underlying mechanisms with ICU-acquired muscle weakness, pathways that are currently unexplored and that can be manipulated with the potential to reverse both problems together. We will test this hypothesis via an experimental and a clinical track. The proposal starts from a novel, controversial idea, developed via experiments in a unique, clinically relevant and validated mouse model of sepsis-induced critical illness and via the study of human patients, and aims to close the loop with a proof-of-concept randomized controlled trial. Our ambition is to identify and test a novel compound, or combination of compounds, to concomitantly reverse adrenal insufficiency and muscle weakness in prolonged critical illness, while avoiding deleterious side-effects and aiming for synergy. Reaching this ambitious goal would represent ground-breaking progress.

Mots-clés : adrenal insufficiency muscle weakness critical care sepsis anterior pituitary neuroendocrinology
Projet ERC : SLaVEgents (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Protestant Theological University — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : PThU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 56250.0 €

SLaVEgents is an ambitious project focused on slave agency; it aims to explore how enslaved persons in antiquity actively shaped the societies they lived in. It will examine the multiple identities of enslaved persons, the communities and networks that they created or participated in, and how slave agency brought about major political, social, economic and cultural changes in the ancient world. By exploring the various forms of slave agency, SLaVEgents will offer a radically new perspective on antiquity from the point of view of history from below. The project moves beyond the usual focus on slavery in classical Greece and Roman Italy to offer a comprehensive examination of the history of enslaved persons across Western Eurasia and North Africa between 1000 BCE and 300 CE. SLaVEgents is the first project to examine together all ancient slaveries from Mesopotamia to the Atlantic, and include sources in the full range of ancient languages (Assyrian, Babylonian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician, Egyptian, Greek, Latin) and the relevant archaeological data. The research team – composed of the PI, eight senior researchers, seven post-doctoral researchers and three PhD candidates – will construct a large-scale digital prosopography of all attested ancient slaves which will include all relevant sources in the original and in English translation. The Linked Open Data created by the digital prosopography will enable new forms of quantitative and qualitative research and will make a significant contribution to Digital Humanities. The monograph and the two collective volumes of the project will offer an important step towards rewriting the history of antiquity with slaves at its centre. In addition, the project will deliver fifteen articles, three PhD dissertations, three workshops, one international conference and a website.

Mots-clés : slavery agency ancient history history from below mediterranean history ancient greece ancient rome history of the ancient near east ancient egypt ancient judaism