Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : BioCHIPs (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université du Minho — Pays : Portugal — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UMinho
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Biochips proposes an innovative bottom-up strategy to directly fabricate cell-laden devices that recreate the unique biophysical cues from the native fibrillar ECMs and allow the design of bioengineered microtissues with arbitrary geometries. The proposed platform combines the concepts of matrix-assisted 3D free-form bioprinting with the controlled self-assembly of colloidal cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) to fabricate cell-laden constructs embedded within its own fibrillar CNC hydrogel device. The proposed platform can array multiple independent single organ models in a high-throughput manner (number will depend on the desired model complexity and well plate used) or link multiple tissue/organ models together with microfluidic circuits that can be user-defined on their CAD designs. The BioCHIPS system enables high-resolution printing of complex and perfusable multicellular constructs without separating membranes or plastic barriers, where cells can interact through signaling gradients created by compartmentalization in a bioinspired fibrillar matrix, and supporting their long-term culture. In addition to optical transparency for real time monitoring, CNCs hydrogels can be bioorthogonally digested to release the embedded constructs for post-bioprinting analysis and processing, which is a crucial advantage in organ/tissue-on-chip applications. Beyond the fabrication of perfusable microfluidic channels and cell-laden chambers for the development of 3D microphysiological systems as in vitro models, the intrinsic characteristics of this bioinspired platform, further enables its scale up to produce tissue engineered constructs within its own bioreactor for in vitro maturation and biological tests at higher scales.
Projet ERC : REGENERA (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université d'Helsinki — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

REGENERA will assess the technical and commercial feasibility of a novel and optimised C-MANF peptide as a superior treatment for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). ALS is a fatal neurodegenerative disease affecting 450,000 people worldwide where motoneurons (MNs) selectively degenerate in the brain and spinal cord. ALS is characterised by muscle deterioration that rapidly leads to disability and culminates in death 3-5 years after diagnosis. Unfortunately, there is no cure for ALS and current treatments only marginally slow down its progression. Moreover, promising neurotrophic factors (NTFs) with neuroprotective activity show insufficient efficiency, are unable to reach the brain tissue, and have highly invasive administration routes (i.e. brain injections and intrathecal) and high production costs. As a result, all NTFs clinical trials have failed. Ass. Prof. Voutilainen has discovered C-MANF, a novel peptide which, in contrast to classical NTFs, (i) has protective and restorative effects on motoneurons, (ii) penetrates the blood-brain barrier (BBB), (iii) can be subcutaneously administered, and (iv) can be inexpensively produced. Within REGENERA, we will assess whether C-MANF is feasible as an early-therapy option for ALS. Firstly, we will analyse the pharmacokinetic properties and efficacy of C-MANF in ALS animal models and in human MNS. Subsequently, commercial feasibility will be determined by verifying IP position and strategy, performing in-depth market and competitor analyses, and finally consolidating these into a business case to establish the best path to commercialisation. Successful commercialisation of C-MANF could reduce the profound socioeconomic burden of ALS, provide an early-therapy option to delay disease progression and thus extend and improve the patients’ lives, and provide the pharmaceutical industry with a novel therapeutic that can potentially be used for other neurodegenerative diseases.
Projet ERC : ADJU-PLATFORM (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Center for Cooperative Research in Biosciences — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

ADJU-PLATFORM seeks to leverage a breakthrough made in the ERC-2016-STG-716878 project to validate a synthetic technological platform for the efficient production of optimised saponin adjuvants and improved cost-effective vaccines. We have recently developed in the laboratory a potent, safe, stable and streamlined platform based on an optimised version of the vaccine adjuvant QS-21 that has led to patent applications and raised the interest of the pharmaceutical industry. In this PoC project, we aim to exploit our synthetic saponin technology to produce scalable adjuvant and vaccine candidates that outperform existing products more cost-effectively, lowering the risk profile of the commercialisation potential, while also achieving valorisation outcomes for market entry. The goal is to demonstrate our innovative minimal adjuvant platform in relevant settings for the advancement of novel adjuvant prototypes and molecular vaccines closer to the market. The breakthrough innovation potential of ADJU-PLATFORM lies in the exploitation of this adjuvant vaccine platform for its application with additional formulation systems in a range of disease areas, expanding and improving the available vaccine solutions. The high purity and excellent chemical control over our synthetic platform compared to the heterogeneous natural product adjuvants, as well as its streamlined, modular nature and low-cost profile are distinctive attributes of our technology that will be valorised herein, making it a potentially superior alternative to existing vaccine models with less structural definition and costlier timelines. The main objectives are (1) demonstrate our synthetic technology platform for the streamlined and efficient development of scalable adjuvant and vaccine solutions and (2) implement valorisation opportunities of our platform and products by establishing an optimal IPR strategy and a “go-to-market” roadmap for the commercialisation.
Projet ERC : HyperCitizen (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Jyväskylä — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Citizen science has become an integral part of biodiversity research with enormous potential for both improving biodiversity monitoring and involving citizens in scientific projects. However, the full integration of data generated with citizen science in professional research programs has not been fully reached. This is largely due to methodological challenges that compromise the value of the data that most citizen science projects have up to date generated. HyperCitizen will create an innovative solution that enables citizen science projects to generate data that are essentially equally informative as data generated by professional scientists. At the same time, HyperCitizen will provide additional value for the citizen scientists themselves, engaging them more profoundly to scientific research than has been earlier possible. HyperCitizen derives from recent results generated by the ERC-Synergy project LIFEPLAN: “A Planetary Inventory of Life – a New Synthesis Built on Big Data Combined with Novel Statistical Methods”. HyperCitizen will develop a mobile phone application for citizen science -based bird monitoring, enabling real-time interaction with users by hyperautomation. It will further develop computationally highly scalable methods for (i) convolutional neural network -based bird vocalization classification and (ii) joint species distribution modelling used produce prediction maps on past, present and future distributions of birds and their vocalizations. The proof of concept will be delivered by teaming up with bird enthusiast organizations and the Finnish national broadcasting company to launch and run a citizen science campaign on Finnish bird monitoring, culminating in the Great Migratory Bird Evening in spring 2024. HyperCitizen aimed to demonstrate how public can be engaged in research in a way that breaks the current wall between citizen science and professional science.
Projet ERC : AXESS (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : École polytechnique de Milan — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : PoliMi
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The New Space is expected to become the biggest industry in human history. In 2023, the global space economy was valued at about $500B. The number of space probes is bound to thrive, yet their growth is unsustainable: developing spacecraft autonomy is paramount to remove the costs and limits of human-in-the-loop operation activities. However, developing resilient autonomous technologies requires extensive empirical testing in representative environmental conditions, and access-to-space costs are still prohibitive.  AXESS offers a web-based Testing-as-a-Service platform dedicated to spacecraft systems and technologies. Erected over the EXTREMA Simulation Hub, AXESS provides an integrated testing environment in which high-fidelity, X-in-the-loop experiments of space systems are performed under a state-of-the-art accelerated framework. Moreover, AXESS allows adopters to embrace a more flexible and agile CI/CD philosophy, enabling automated testing of space software, firmware, and IP core designs on modules and testbenches that are representative of real space technologies and hardware. Access to the platform will be granted through a web-based user interface, from which it will be possible to configure the automatic and manual test routines, monitor and control the ongoing testing activities in real-time, and collect simulation logs and metrics. AXESS allows the users to carry out data-driven system design, debugging, and fine-tuning through all the phases of the system development lifecycle.  The project follows a suitably devised pathway to cover technical validation activities and assessment of exploitation opportunities. AXESS has raised the interest of the leading sectoral players and space agencies, as witnessed by the letters of support attached.
Projet ERC : INCANT (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : École polytechnique de Milan — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : PoliMi
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 120000.0 €

In view of the ongoing energy transition, solutions for the transportation and storage of hydrogen are urgently needed. Ammonia is recognized in principle as the best hydrogen carrier, but a bottleneck is represented by the lack of efficient industrial technologies for ammonia decomposition (cracking), a necessary step for hydrogen recovery. Capitalizing on the previous ERC projects of the PI (INTENT, AdG 2015; INSTANT, PoC 2020), INCANT proposes to develop an innovative reactor technology to valorise the potential of ammonia as energy vector via its cracking to hydrogen. The novelty core of INCANT is an electrified catalytic reactor configuration, which features ohmic heating of highly porous cellular internals (e.g., open-cell foams, 3D printed POCS). As demonstrated in the parent AdG ERC project INTENT for the case of another endothermic reaction, i.e. methane steam reforming, this solution provides a twofold advantage, in that: i) the high porosity can be packed with a large amount of catalyst particles, which is key to increase the conversion efficiency of the relatively slow NH3 cracking process; ii) the electrically and thermally connected cellular internals enable a very effective and uniform supply of the endothermic heat of reaction across the catalyst bed through the Joule effect (heat generation due to the passage of electric current in a conductor), with thermal efficiencies approaching 100%. The goal of INCANT is to adapt and demonstrate the same concept for the ammonia cracking reaction, developing a prototype NH3 reformer which will revolutionize the technology associated with the use of ammonia as hydrogen carrier: it will in fact enable the ammonia decomposition in compact, intensified structured reactors, which is optimal for distributed applications. If using electricity from renewable sources (wind, solar…), this concept results in releasing hydrogen with virtually no CO2 emissions.
Projet ERC : GUIDO (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : École polytechnique de Milan — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : PoliMi
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The “space revolution” is expected to become the biggest industry in history. During the last decades, space exploration has contributed to the development of various technologies (e.g., GPS, weather predictions, solar cells, reliable power grid, Earth observation services) that fedback into the economy and improved our lives. In 2020, the global space economy was valued at about $ 446.9 B. With the advent of deep-space CubeSats, nanosatellites that disrupted this industry, space agencies are planning to launch tens of CubeSat in deep space per single launch. The number of deep-space probes is bound to thrive, yet their growth is unsustainable with current practice. Human-in-the-loop operations are particularly relevant for flight-related procedures in cruise phase: the spacecraft position is determined from ground, with a consistent involvement of resources and assets. It is acknowledged that a sustainable deep-space exploration requires enabling self-driving spacecraft. The GUIDO project forges an autonomous guidance board to enable the self-driving capability of spacecraft in the solar system. The project stems from the ERC-funded project EXTREMA (ERC-CoG-2019). GUIDO aims to elevate the convex-optimization-based guidance algorithms conceived within EXTREMA to a proof-of-concept board at TRL 4. Our autonomous guidance board, GUIDOboard, is a disruptive innovation that will change the modus operandi of deep-space satellite operation. GUIDO will revolutionize the way spacecraft travel in space, by cutting the cost of ground control of the whole cruise phase and unlocking the new space mission concept. The project follows a suitably devised pathway to cover technical validation activities and assessment of exploitation opportunities. GUIDO has raised the interest of leading sectoral players and space agencies, as witnessed by the letters of interest attached.
Projet ERC : Cyclo-warhead (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ICIQ
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Over the past two decades, the pharmaceutical industry has witnessed an exponential growth in approved covalent drugs. The majority of such drugs incorporate a chemical warhead, a mild electrophilic reactive functional group that forms covalent bonds in a reversible or irreversible manner with nucleophilic aminoacid residues. The aim of this proposal is to assess the viability of a new chemical warhead in the discovery of novel kinase inhibitors.
Projet ERC : SAFE-ON (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ICN2
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Infectious diseases are a rapidly growing threat to humanity. For instance, the current COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2, has already killed over 4.5 million people since 2019 and is taking a devastating socioeconomic toll around the world. Similarly, nosocomial infections are among the major causes of death and increased morbidity, causing thousands of deaths every year in Europe. Recently, the use of antimicrobial coatings has garnered increasing interest as a simple prophylactic strategy to combat these infectious diseases. In this PoC project, we aim advancing a new patented antimicrobial coating technology called SAFE-ON, into the pre-commercial stage, with the aim of demonstrating its breakthrough innovation potential and approaching its arrival to market.  The first part of this project encompasses optimization of SAFE-ON technology as highly efficient, smart antimicrobial coatings. This entails the preparation of two antimicrobial coatings based on commercial formulations used in catheters and door-handle covers (one based on hydrogels and the other, on silicone), and subsequent testing of their antimicrobial capacity. It also involves preparing the first two SAFE-ON prototypes: one coated catheter and one door-handle cover. The second part of SAFE-ON will be dedicated to intellectual property (IP) and market aspects needed for the pre-commercialization of this new technology for antimicrobial coatings. This study will include a freedom-to-operate analysis and a market study to identify the antimicrobial coating producers that could ultimately serve as manufacturing partners.  In this project we will design, fabricate and evaluate two innovative prototypes incorporating our iodine delivery platform, with the aim to assess the commercial viability of with antimicrobial SAFE-ON coatings, accelerate their market entry and ultimately, commercialize and further develop antimicrobial coatings and other biocide products based on our technology.
Projet ERC : SWIRL (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Institute of Photonic Sciences — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ICFO
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Optical sensing and imaging has evolved from taking digital images to a powerful metrology, imaging and data acquisition technique by expanding the spectral coverage from the visible to the short-wave infrared (SWIR). SWIR sensing and imaging is the cornerstone of advanced imaging techniques for 3D visualization, night vision, imaging though adverse weather conditions, biomedical imaging, spectroscopy for food quality and health monitoring, just to name a few. The huge market size of such applications, especially by entering volume markets including consumer electronics and automotive, has led to the first commercial appearances of low cost CMOS compatible SWIR photodetectors and image sensors. Yet for the realization of the afore-mentioned technologies the optical source is an equally important and crucial component to be considered at system level. To date, there is a lack of infrared optical sources that are CMOS compatible, low-cost with competitive performance over the standard costly epitaxial III-V light emitters. Moreover high cost and epitaxial growth manufacturing processes have limited the size and form factor of those sources to small and rigid elements preventing their use as high power and large area illumination sources. SWIRL will undertake this challenge to develop high performance low-cost SWIR optical sources with tunable emission peaks and spectral bandwidths across the eye-safety SWIR window, exploiting colloidal quantum dot technology. By leveraging engineering at the nanoscale and solution processed materials we will develop in TRL4/5 SWIR optical emitters that are low-cost, high efficiency, even rivalling their epitaxial counterparts, and spectrally versatile across the SWIR. We will further demonstrate their use in key applications related to automotive industry as optical sources for active SWIR imaging and in-cabin monitoring in the eye-safety infrared window.
Projet ERC : SludgeCam (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de technologie de Delft — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TU Delft
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 120000.0 €

The EU produces more than 45000 tons of waste-water sludge per day as byproduct of municipal and industrial water purification activities. This enormous amount can become a gold mine for materials recovery, or an environmental burden, depending on how well waste-treatment plants can remove water from these sludges. Today sludge treatment processes are based on unoptimized methods, which rely on operator experience and low-tech equipment, and are not able to deal with the fast-changing sludge type evolution, resulting in loss of time, energy and money, as well as a negative environmental impact.  The SludgeCam project will deliver an innovative smart camera centrifuge, having advanced software, hardware and sensing features, which will enable plant operators to consciously adapt treatment process parameters, select flocculant polymers and set standards for different sludge types, based on solid, reproducible data, so that more environmentally-friendly water treatment operations and drastically reduced energy consumption for sludge incineration will be achieved.
Projet ERC : ABuMic (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de technologie de Delft — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TU Delft
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 120000.0 €

ABuMic aims to address a critical challenge of our society: the transition of formulated products to a safer and more sustainable industry. There is increasing pressure on the industry, both from the public opinion and regulatory bodies, for healthier food products and more environmentally friendly paints and coatings. As a result, in the coming years many formulated products will need to be re-formulated. This will come at a huge cost for the industry, because by and large, product development is still done by trial-and-error. This means that the formulated products industry needs more than ever the capability to predict formulation performance for rapid screening of new products. The current challenge is that processing flows and end-use produce flow conditions that are not accessible with existing methods for materials characterization. With the ABuMic device, a formulation scientist will be able to design a new product more quickly and efficiently, thereby lowering the cost of new product development, and supporting the transition to healthier and more sustainable products.