Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : SOLVOLi (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
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 €

To allow the rollout of e-mobility and stationary renewable energy storage in Europe, a secure, affordable and sustainable supply of battery-grade lithium salts for Li-ion batteries (LIBs) is key. However, Europe’s lithium supply chain is extremely vulnerable: Europe’s primary lithium resources (present as “hard rock”) are underexploited and, even if lithium would be mined domestically, there is no lithium refining capacity available in Europe to process the lithium into battery-grade lithium salts, i.e. Li2CO3 and LiOH (with the latter being vital for the emerging Li-ion NMC battery chemistries with lower Co and enriched Ni content). Concurrently, the state of the art Li2CO3 refining methods (cf. China, Latin America…) come with a large eco-footprint, while the conventional conversion of Li2CO3 to the coveted LiOH generates vast volumes of waste and introduces new impurities. Based on an innovation developed in the PI’s ERC Advanced Grant SOLCRIMET, SOLVOLi aims to develop the Proof of Concept for a disruptive, solvometallurgical flowsheet for the production, via LiCl, of LiOH. As this flowsheet allows to bypass the Li2CO3 step, SOLVOLi lowers the overall water, energy, CO2 and reagent footprint of LiOH production. Apart from validating and pre-demonstrating the novel flowsheet, SOLVOLi comprises a thorough IPR and upscaling strategy, in close collaboration with EU-based companies. SOLVOLi takes advantage of the fact that most of their decisions on lithium refining investments in Europe still need to be made, opening the door for the commercialisation of the new SOLVOLi process. Application of this flowsheet contributes to building up the urgently needed lithium refining capacity in Europe for both domestic lithium (hard rocks & slags from pyrometallurgical LIB recycling) and imported lithium resources. As such, SOLVOLi facilitates the EC's strategic battery value chain ambitions (COM(2019)176)) and supports A New Industrial Strategy for Europe (COM(2020)102).

Mots-clés : chemical engineering,technical chemistry,extractive metallurgy,lithium,lithium ion batteries,materials,energy materials,ion exchange,organic solvents
Projet ERC : MUSICOL (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : Fondation partenariale de l'université Côte d'Azur — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Autres
Financement ERC de l'entité : 862822.5 €

To better understand cultural relations in today’s multi-ethnic, multicultural societies, we need to revisit the legacy of modern empires. This project delves into the musical dimension of the French empire and what differences were negotiated through aurality, long-neglected by historians. Focusing on musical life and media from Dakar and Rabat to Saigon, 1900-1962, it studies how music was practiced, heard, and understood in a variety of colonial contexts. Crucially important is the need to investigate the tastes, practices, and interactions of Europeans and natives, usually studied in isolation. Such scope requires an entirely new methodological paradigm: relational, comparative, and integrative-synthetic. Traversing disciplinary boundaries separating musicology from history, media studies, and ethnomusicology, the project has four objectives: (1) To musicalize history, it probes what musical fields of production contribute to current debates on the nature of empire and colonial identities. (2) To historicize aural media, it examines live and recorded music on radio as windows on the dynamic nature of colonial coexistence. (3) To globalize music history, it brings new coherence with its focus on a single empire and without imposing postcolonial models of domination/resistance. (4) To creolize research, it integrates indigenous research and promotes dialogue with collaborators from the former empire. Foundations laid by the PI’s prior research in colonial archives, availability of sources, each team member’s expertise and focus on one field, their shared method, and common purpose insure its feasibility. This pioneering study of the modern French empire through music will generate new insights into its mechanisms and constituencies, taking colonial, media, and music history in unprecedented directions. Only in understanding the aurality of colonialism--what helped their imperialism take hold and last--can Europeans grasp its full nature, meaning, and legacy.

Mots-clés : colonial radio history,colonial governance,urban spaces,french empire,concerts,musical networks
Projet ERC : eAXON (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Pompeu Fabra University — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UPF
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999813.0 €

To build interfaces between the electronic domain and the human nervous system is one of the most demanding challenges of nowadays engineering. Fascinating developments have already been performed such as visual cortical implants for the blind and cochlear implants for the deaf. Yet implantation of most electrical stimulation systems requires complex surgeries which hamper their use for the development of so-called electroceuticals. More importantly, previously developed systems based on central stimulation units are not adequate for applications in which a large number of sites must be individually stimulated over large and mobile body parts, thus hindering neuroprosthetic solutions for patients suffering paralysis due to spinal cord injury or other neurological disorders. A solution to these challenges could consist in developing addressable single-channel wireless microstimulators which could be implanted with simple procedures such as injection. And, indeed, such solution was proposed and tried in the past. However, previous attempts did not achieve satisfactory success because the developed implants were stiff and too large. Further miniaturization was prevented because of the use of inductive coupling and batteries as energy sources. Here I propose to explore an innovative method for performing electrical stimulation in which the implanted microstimulators will operate as rectifiers of bursts of innocuous high frequency current supplied through skin electrodes shaped as garments. This approach has the potential to reduce the diameter of the implants to one-fifth the diameter of current microstimulators and, more significantly, to allow that most of the implants’ volume consists of materials whose density and flexibility match those of neighbouring living tissues for minimizing invasiveness. In fact, implants based on the proposed method will look like short pieces of flexible thread.

Mots-clés : biomedical electronics,biomedical engineering,biomedical implants,electrical stimulation,neuroprosthetics,rectifiers,minimal invasiveness,electroceuticals,paralysis,neuropathic pain
Projet ERC : RESpiReS (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
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 : 2460062.0 €

To comprehensively reconstruct the evolution of Earth's climate, atmospheric and seawater chemical compositions, and conditions that favor the proliferation of life, it is critical to constrain all atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and oxygen (O2) sources and sinks—including their dependencies on underlying environmental and geologic drivers. One major CO2 source and O2 sink remains poorly understood: oxidative weathering of sulfide minerals (e.g., pyrite) on land. In addition to driving Earth's atmospheric composition, pyrite oxidation potentially provides a quantitative proxy for recording past O2 and CO2 levels: the triple-oxygen isotope composition of sulfate. Still, three key questions remain unanswered: (i) what sets the modern-day pyrite oxidation flux, (ii) how has this flux changed over million- to hundred-million-year timescales, and (iii) do geologically preserved sulfate isotopes faithfully record past atmospheric conditions? Here, I outline a multifaceted research program to answer these questions. This research will develop and apply novel experiments and state-of-the-art geochemical tracers to mechanistically understand pyrite oxidation and resulting sulfate isotope signatures. These results will inform theoretical, kinetic, and numerical models to quantify pyrite oxidation fluxes and atmospheric compositions throughout Earth's history—this combination of techniques is uniquely afforded by my background and expertise. Specifically, this research will: (i) constrain the electrochemical mechanism of pyrite oxidation and its isotopic consequences, (ii) assess which environmental and geologic controlling factors govern pyrite oxidation rates and fluxes, and (iii) determine how secondary redox cycling in the environment overprints sulfate isotope signatures. An ERC Starting Grant will enable me to access the outstanding human resources and scientific infrastructure available at ETH Zürich in order to address this major open questions in modern geochemistry.

Mots-clés : atmospheric composition,biogeochemical cycles,carbon,oxygen,sulfur cycle,carbon dioxide,earth history,erosion,paleoclimate,pyrite oxidation,stable isotopes,triple oxygen isotopes,weathering
Projet ERC : THERMONANO (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases
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 : 1759414.0 €

To counter the predicted drastic rise of new cancer cases over the next decades and to lower the dramatic financial burden of cancer treatments on patients and healthcare systems, innovative chemotherapies with high efficacy and reduced cost represent an urgent and unmet clinical need. Despite great enthusiasm for drug-loaded anticancer nanocarriers (e.g., liposomes, nanoparticles, micelles), their bench-to-bedside translation is not straightforward. Recent disappointments during clinical trials have fuelled concerns as to whether drug-loaded nanocarriers work any better than the free drugs. Thus, significant rethinking of drug delivery from nanocarriers seems inescapable. In the context of THERMONANO, I will develop a new drug delivery strategy that will be simple, efficient, comfortable for the patient and significantly less costly. The idea is to design drug-loaded nanoassemblies that can be administered subcutaneously to enable the self-administration of all kinds of anticancer drugs, including irritant and vesicant drugs. Not only could this approach lead to more easy-to-handle chemotherapies, it could also boost the development of at-home cancer chemotherapy.

Mots-clés : nanoparticles,polymer,progrugs,subcutaneous,cancer,metronomic chemotherapy
Projet ERC : NanoProt-ID (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : Technion – Israel Institute of Technology — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2498869.0 €

To date, antibody-free protein identification methods have not reached single-molecule precision. Instead, they rely on averaging from many cells, obscuring the details of important biological processes. The ability to identify each individual protein from within a single cell would transform proteomics research and biomedicine. However, single protein identification (ID) presents a major challenge, necessitating a breakthrough in single-molecule sensing technologies. We propose to develop a method for proteome-level analysis, with single protein resolution. Bioinformatics studies show that >99% of human proteins can be uniquely identified by the order in which only three amino-acids, Lysine, Cysteine, and Methionine (K, C and M, respectively), appear along the proteins’ chain. By specifically labelling K, C and M residues with three distinct fluorophores, and threading them, one by one, through solid-state nanopores equipped with custom plasmonic amplifiers, we hypothesize that we can obtain multi-color fluorescence time-trace fingerprints uniquely representing most proteins in the human proteome. The feasibility of our method will be established by attaining 4 main aims: i) in vitro K,C,M protein labelling, ii) development of a machine learning classifier to uniquely ID proteins based on their optical fingerprints, iii) fabrication of state-of-the-art plasmonic nanopores for high-resolution optical sensing of proteins, and iv) devising methods for regulating the translocation speed to enhance the signal to noise ratio. Next, we will scale up our platform to enable the analysis of thousands of different proteins in minutes, and apply it to sense blood-secreted proteins, as well as whole proteomes in pre- and post-metastatic cancer cells. NanoProt-ID constitutes the first and most challenging step towards the proteomic analysis of individual cells, opening vast research directions and applications in biomedicine and systems biology.

Mots-clés : plasmonic nanopores,protein fingerprinting
Projet ERC : SENSE (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : University of A Coruña — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1494375.0 €

To date, the main efforts for the design of bioactive self-assembled 1D nanostructures have been focused on the use of static assemblies. The development of synthetic systems with inherently stimuli-responsive behavior will open new possibilities for the creation of artificial architectures that mimic the natural protein nanostructures found in eukaryotic cells, which are dynamic, and capable of rapid growth or disassembly to tune their properties, and thus adapt to the cell needs. SENSE aims to: 1) Define robust peptide-based building blocks, and implement stimuli-responsive interactions between them to engineer complex self-assembled responsive nanostructures. 2) Modify these dynamic platforms to achieve precise nanoscale control over the presentation of bioactive molecules in the final multivalent nanostructures. 3) Apply these responsive and multivalent nanostructures as smart delivery vehicles and improved bioactive scaffolds. 4) Integrate them into living cells as artificial adaptor nanostructures that can present multiple signaling elements for controlling cell behavior. Taken together, the objectives of SENSE will define a new multidisciplinary approach combining organic, peptide, supramolecular and dynamic covalent chemistries, and nanotechnology for the development of adaptive materials that rely on dynamic interactions, and are therefore ideally suited to interfacing with living organisms. During my career I have acquired the singular background that combines chemistry, chemical biology, and nanotechnology required to achieve the objectives of SENSE. Particularly relevant to this project is my experience in peptide synthesis and their modification, as well as in the preparation of supramolecular peptide-based materials and the study of their properties in living cells.

Mots-clés : peptides,nanostructures,host guest chemistry,biomaterials
Projet ERC : GREENBLUE (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : CentraleSupélec — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2352859.0 €

To fight climate change, we must urgently reduce the CO2 emissions caused by fossil-fuel combustion, which represents today over 80% of the primary energy production. Clean electrified solutions are on the horizon but are unlikely to reach commercial development before 2040. Novel CO2-neutral (biofuels) or CO2-free (H2) combustion technologies are widely considered, but these technologies face increasingly stringent regulations on pollutant emissions, in particular nitric oxides and carbon monoxide. To reduce pollutants, the strategy is to use low-temperature flames. However, these flames are prone to instabilities and extinction, thus causing safety issues. Plasma-assisted combustion (PAC) is a highly promising method to stabilize low-temperature flames thanks to the extraordinary ability of plasma discharges to efficiently produce combustion-enhancing radicals. Today, however, their effects on pollutants are poorly understood and their scalability to industrial combustors remains to be proven. Our goal is to bring PAC to the level of maturity needed to make it practical on real combustion devices. For this, we will first elucidate the thermochemical mechanisms of plasma stabilization in CH4- and H2-air flames and their impact on pollutant emissions. This will require measuring the rates of poorly known reactions involving excited electronic states of molecules with advanced femtosecond optical diagnostics. With this knowledge, we will explore two novel strategies to minimize pollutants. We will then develop a robust and versatile multi-physics model to predict PAC effects in large-scale combustors. The final challenge will be to demonstrate for the first time a stable, low NOx, hydrogen/air flame in a combustor representative of aircraft engines. Beyond combustion, this project will open novel ways to better predict, control, and enhance chemical processes in applications such as hydrogen production, CO2 conversion, bio-decontamination, or materials synthesis.

Mots-clés : plasma assisted combustion,plasma chemistry,plasmas,combustion,chemical kinetics,optical diagnostics,plasma processing,pollution control,turbulence,fluid mechanics
Projet ERC : MYSpace (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : Italian Institute of Technology — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

To interact with the world that surrounds us, we rely on integrated spatial representations which we build during infancy. Visual experience is crucial for integrating sensory signals in a coherent configuration, taking into account the changes of body position in space. When vision is absent, as in the case of blind infants, how the space representation develops is still unclear. The aim of MYSpace is to identify the specific developmental periods when visual experience is crucial in establishing multisensory associations between vision and other modalities. Blind infants, blind children and blind adolescents will take part in longitudinal and cross-sectional studies spanning the developmental windows when spatial skills are acquired in sighted children. Advanced methods in psychophysics and neuroscience (high-density EEG and MRI), modeling and high-resolution motion tracking analysis will be used to investigate the following: - the role of vision on the development of independent (Objective 1) and multisensory (Objective 2) audio and tactile spatial representations at the behavioral and cortical levels; - the involvement of the visual cortex on this spatial processing when vision is absent (Objective 3); - the benefit of multisensory trainings to recover spatial impairments (Objective 4). By elucidating these aspects, the project will bridge a fundamental gap in the knowledge of spatial representations and determine how their development is shaped by visual experiences. As an outcome, MYSpace will provide a new quantitative methodology to restore the coherent spatial representations of blind infants through multisensory trainings.

Mots-clés : perception,action,visual disability,multi sensory integration,spatial perception,audio,tactile,rehabilitation,development,blind,plasticity
Projet ERC : DDREAMM (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Medical University of Vienna — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 982640.0 €

To monitor and protect their genomes, eukaryotic cells have evolved sophisticated DNA-damage response (DDR) systems that comprise DNA repair and DNA-damage signaling processes. DDR deficiencies are associated with diverse human disorders, ranging from aggressive hereditary and sporadic cancers to inherited genetic diseases. The impact of DNA repair has also recently been harnessed to treat diseases through “synthetic lethal” cancer treatments and CRISPR-Cas genome editing. However, the fundamental interactions between DDR pathways that underpin such therapeutic opportunities are still not well understood. Furthermore, we are only just beginning to understand how suppressive functional interactions (so-called “synthetic viability”) can lead to resistance to DDR-targeting therapeutics. Our proposed research will address these important issues by using cutting-edge technologies in gene editing and chemical biology, and by taking a multidisciplinary approach to create deeply integrated genetic and physical maps of DDR pathways and interactions in many human cell types. Next-generation CRISPR-Cas transcriptional genome-wide approaches will be used to uncover hypo- and hyper-morph alleles that affect cellular sensitivity to DNA-damaging agents and DDR-enzyme inhibitors, thus providing insights into DDR events and explaining human DDR-deficiency phenotypes. Mass spectrometry and in-depth mechanistic studies will establish physical interaction networks within the genetic framework and reveal the signaling logic that underpins DDR outcomes and vulnerabilities. With chemical-genetic approaches, we will develop small molecule tools to precisely interrogate DDR pathways and that could lead to new therapeutic agents. In sum, our work should provide major insights into human genome surveillance in multiple cell types, yield powerful tools to precisely control DNA repair outcomes, and speed the development of new therapies for cancer and other diseases.

Mots-clés : crispr cas,genetic screening,physical interaction,drug discovery,synthetic lethality,synthetic resistance,dna damage and repair