Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : RARA AML (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Inserm
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

In acute promyelocytic leukaemia (APL), retinoic acid (RA) and arsenic trioxide (ATO) bind the PML/RARA fusion to promote its degradation, derepressing unknown master regulatory genes and activating a PML/P53 checkpoint which is required for APL cure. APL initiation deregulates Retinoic Acid Receptor a (RARA) signalling. These deregulations are likely shared with a sizable subset of non-APL acute myeloid leukaemia (AML): the 30% that overexpress normal RARA and exhibit some RA-sensitivity ex vivo. Clinical trials have demonstrated some benefit of RA addition to conventional therapies in non-APL AML patients, but have not resulted in the incorporation of RA into standard therapies. Thus, modulation of RARA signalling is an unrealized target for treatment of non-APL AMLs. Of importance, RARA serves a dual function in APL by promoting leukemogenesis in the unliganded state, but also by enforcing RA-response. We made the striking observation that overexpression of RARA suffices to confer cell self-renewal ex vivo and RA-sensitivity in several AML models. We propose to i) define the actual effects (differentiation, self-renewal) and cellular mechanisms (senescence, apoptosis, growth arrest) underlying RA action on a variety of primary myeloid cells over-expressing RARA ii) delineate the mechanism(s) underlying RARA overexpression in some human AMLs iii) identify the RARA downstream targets that drive self-renewal iv) discover novel RA-containing drug combinations exhibiting synergies for AML clearance in RA-sensitive transformed myeloid cells. This proposal is based on our previous modelling of APL therapy and recent disruptive observations. This renewed exploration of RARA-driven progenitor self-renewal will allow us to define novel curative RA-containing strategies and biomarkers for many AML patients unfit for chemotherapy, who are currently not eligible for cure.

Mots-clés : retinoids,aml,biomarkers,
Projet ERC : Histogenomics (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Université de Strasbourg — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UNISTRA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Allogeneic tissue graft (hematopoietic cell transplantation; HCT) and solid organ transplantation (SOT) (Kidney, Heart, Lung,..) save tens of thousands of lives annually. Yet their success is compounded by a high incidence of the potentially fatal graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) in HCT and chronic rejection (CR) in SOT. This is primarily due to the existence of yet unknown histocompatibility loci which have escaped detection - besides certain immunogenic peptides - since the identification of the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC; also called Human Leukocyte antigen “HLA” in man) in 1940-1950s. The identification of these hitherto unknown histocompatibility loci in man is the major aim of this proposal. Our contribution to MHC genetics includes the identification of the sole, non-HLA, MHC-encoded, class I molecules; the MHC class I chain-related MIC genes (A second lineage of mammalian major histocompatibility complex class I genes. | PNAS), which we recently qualified as a bona fide histocompatibility gene (The MHC class I MICA gene is a histocompatibility antigen in kidney transplantation | Nature Medicine). Here we aim to identify the totality of histocompatibility loci embedded within our genome. We will apply a pluri-omics approach (successfully applied elsewhere Identification of driver genes for critical forms of COVID-19 in a deeply phenotyped young patient cohort (science.org)) on deeply phenotyped cohorts of kidney transplants and HCT. Identified candidate loci will be validated based on their ability to be presented by MHC molecule and to elicit T- and/or B-cell responses. In contrast to the classical, hypothesis-driven approaches, which have collectively failed to identify universally applicable such loci in the past 70 years, our approach is unbiased, data-driven and unprecedented in the field. It shall have direct relevance in our understanding of the primum movens of GvHD and CR and shall lead to a personalized therapy of the transplant patient.

Mots-clés : major histocompatibility complex,hla,histocompatibility,kidney transplantation,hematopoietic cell transplantation,graft versus host disease
Projet ERC : MFA (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Studies of Cultures and Arts
Entité participante : Université de Helwan — Pays : Égypte — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 81730.0 €

Many young African lives are paused in ‘waithood’ (Honwana 2012): no longer children but unable to become independent adults. Many manage this situation through sport, religion, or both. The question at the heart of MFA is how sport and religion in tandem provide a way out of ‘waithood’.  Sport and religion alternately reference each other as performance enhancers. Both have been posited as catalysts for development and integration, however, their interplay remains under-theorised. Social science views sport through a secular lens, while religious studies have been slow to recognise the ‘religious’ elements of sport. If they do, studies are limited to a Western, Christian context. MFA will span existing academic siloes by taking a multidisciplinary approach, considering the interplay between sport and religion from a non-Western, non-Christian perspective.  Africa is known as the ‘sporting continent’ and Africans as the ‘most religious people’, making it a unique setting to investigate i) the ‘sport-religion nexus’ – how each appropriates the other’s values and practices and how they affect each other; and ii) how this nexus enables meaning and purpose. MFA will 1) deepen understanding of the sport-religion nexus; 2) innovate an Afrocentric, actor-oriented approach focused on lived experience; 3) centre Africa’s global sporting prowess, redressing misconceptions of Africa as peripheral; and 4) assess the potential of the sport-religion nexus as a catalyst for youth development. This will be achieved through case studies that document sports appropriating elements from different religions (Christianity, Islam, and African Endogenous Religions): boxing in Nigeria; soccer in South Africa; karate in Egypt; long-distance running in Kenya.  MFA’s dissemination and open-access academic, creative, and policy outputs will contribute to decolonising knowledge production about Africa, fostering South-North collaborations, and enhancing capacity development in Africa.

Mots-clés : sport,religion,youth,gender,faith based development,africa,ethnography
Projet ERC : IN-ROME (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : École normale supérieure de Pise — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2065503.25 €

Rome as the first-ever mega-city reaching c.1 million inhabitants in the early empire (1st cent. BCE), remains an enigma regarding the way it organised itself and maintained that size for over three centuries. Having long outgrown the 4th-cent. BCE city walls, the urbanistic structures that developed outside of these, and especially outside the later Aurelian Wall, have never been studied systematically and holistically. IN-ROME aims to fill this fundamental gap. It will describe for the first time how different parts of the population (ethnicities, status groups, genders) and their activities map onto the city’s surroundings via military stations, association seats, sanctuaries, production sites, mines, agriculture, retail, baths, guesthouses, tombs and villas. Translating topographical relations into social ones, it aims significantly to enhance our understanding of the city’s social fabric. Methodologically, IN-ROME breaks new ground by unlocking the enormous potential of inscriptions for our understanding of Rome’s urban development and social fabric through virtual re-contextualisation and statistical analysis. The authoritative Epigraphic Database Roma will be extended to include all Latin and Greek inscriptions with known or probable provenance (totalling c.50,000). They will be linked to Rome’s most sophisticated Digital Archaeological Cadastre, SITAR, via a newly created map layer of 17th-20th-cent. properties (the main historic reference to location). These new resources will allow the exploration of topographical patterns of activities on an unprecedented scale, revolutionising access to a vast pool of historic information and restoring Rome’s people back into their landscape. Outputs include six books and two international conferences with proceedings. The geo-referenced inscriptions and historic property map will be lasting resources beyond this project, and will radically transform a wide range of research from multiple disciplines.

Mots-clés : roman history roman archaeology epigraphy gis databases city of rome
Projet ERC : CATNIP (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : University College de Londres — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2491860.0 €

Political scientists have collected rich data for understanding the preferences of citizens regarding which policies their governments ought to enact, as well as for investigating where these preferences do and do not exist, and how they arise. In contrast, we have poor data and methods for understanding which problems citizens think are most severe and which government policy should be urgently addressing. These questions of problems and priorities are difficult to investigate because they are challenging to formulate in terms of closed-ended survey questions that yield cross-nationally and inter-temporally comparable data. This project addresses this gap by using innovative techniques to measure citizens’ views about problem severity and priority. The proposed applications, in turn, will push forward our understanding of how citizens understand what politics and policy-making are trying to achieve, how they interact with media information sources and their representatives, all of which are core concerns of the study of political behaviour and public opinion. This research would enable a major step forward in our understanding of several political science questions. First, which people, in which countries, are relatively engaged with and prioritise global problems (e.g. international environmental, security, and economic issues) by comparison to more immediate local or national problems? Are views about political problems generally stable over time, at the level of individual citizens or at the level of populations? Second, to what extent do major media sources and/or political actors set the problem agenda for citizens, versus responding to citizens’ existing problem agenda? Third, what are the electoral implications of politicians and media emphasizing or de-emphasizing specific problems? When is articulating a problem, perhaps even in the absence of articulating a policy solution, an important component of gaining credibility with voters?
Projet ERC : AnthropoloJOY (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : University College de Londres — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2546930.0 €

Joy is rarely the focus of the social sciences but is arguably more important than it has ever been. While crisis might be a ‘structural signature of modernity’ the experience of crisis today is characterised by complex systems themselves in crisis, interacting with each other in unpredictable ways. This ‘metacrisis’ is ubiquitous, enduring, and emotionally exhausting. Yet, for people around the world, living in and through the metacrisis requires joy to sustain them: experiences of joyous self-transcendence that support political resistance, psychological resilience and social repair.  AnthropoloJOY is a novel exploratory investigation into the cross-cultural value, experience and expression of joy in contexts of crisis. The project’s research aims are: 1. To gather much-needed empirical and comparative data on the value, experience, and expression of joy in cross-cultural perspective. 2. To develop an innovative, comparative theoretical framework for understanding joy 3. To establish a new epistemological paradigm for collaborative, more inclusive and increasingly decolonised social science. These aims will be achieved by combining four empirically grounded work packages over the first three years of the project with an agenda-setting position piece in year 4 and an ambitious programme of interdisciplinary outreach and collaboration in year 5. AnthropoloJOY innovates by being the first cross-cultural study of joy grounded in long-term qualitative research methods. Moreover, AnthropoloJOY is rigorously structured around an innovative theoretical approach, a novel combination of qualitative and participatory research methods, and a pioneering commitment to fostering a positive research culture. By modelling new and more expansive ways to conduct collaborative research with participants and communities, AnthropoloJOY boldly challenges academic consensus on the crises of modernity and proposes an intervention that committedly emphasises the possibility of change.

Mots-clés : joy,crisis,anthropology,social sciences
Projet ERC : NEHA (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Italian Institute of Technology — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499375.0 €

Building epitaxial interfaces between two materials that match each other with atomic precision is key to control the flow of electrons in many technological devices spanning electronics, optics and catalysis. Today, these interfaces are realized also with colloidal nanocrystals, for example in the strongly light emitting core/shell quantum dots used in TV displays. For nanocrystals, the synthesis of epitaxial interfaces based on traditional semiconductors (metal chalcogenides/pnictides, etc.) is well consolidated, while it has been much more challenging with metal halides (including the popular halide perovskites), for two reasons: (i) the attempt of coupling materials that are structurally very different from each other; (ii) the high reactivity of metal halide nanocrystals that defies conventional approaches to make heterostructures. This is regretful, considering that many applications (in lighting, energy conversion, catalysis, etc.) would greatly benefit from the ability to grow heterostructures, also considering the variety of materials belonging to the metal halide family. In NEHA, I will turn the intrinsic reactivity of metal halide nanocrystals into an opportunity to re-design synthetic strategies of nanoscale epitaxial nano-heterostructures in which at least one component is a metal halide. I will leverage on our recent discovery that these heterostructures can form when there is a continuity of ionic sublattices, ensuring that the local coordination of ions at the interface is similar in both components. My aims are to: i) identify materials that can be coupled to form epitaxial heterostructures; ii) uncover the synthesis conditions to make these nano-heterostructures; iii) study their properties, also with advanced techniques and modelling, and transformative behaviour; iv) exploit them in proof-of-concept applications that will benefit from the presence of metal halide interfaces. These will include photocatalysis, photoharvesting and photonic devices.

Mots-clés : nanocrystals,semiconductors,heterostructures,metal halides,halide perovskites,interfaces
Projet ERC : IMPERIAL ENCOUNTER (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Aix-Marseille Université — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : amU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2167632.5 €

Named ‘Aphrodito archive’ because it originates in that otherwise unremarkable Middle-Egyptian town, the most important papyrological archive of the early Caliphate contains the papers of an early-eighth-century district administrator, including correspondence with the provincial governor in the new Muslim capital Fustat, and with village heads in his district, as well as registers and accounts generally related to tax and resource extraction. Known for over a century, the Aphrodito archive remains underexploited, largely because of its inaccessibility. Its three languages (Arabic, Coptic, Greek), difficult-to-access editions, and lack of translations have acted as a break to its study, and the partial nature of the existing translated texts (mainly those coming from above) has created a skewed view of its nature, which is much more organic and dialectical than has been allowed for. IMPERIAL ENCOUNTER will make this invaluable group of documents available to scholars by providing a full translation of the archive’s documents IMPERIAL ENCOUNTER will also use this archive to produce a microhistory of the Aphrodito area and its engagement with the new empire. Containing documents from above and from below, the archive admirably illustrates the Caliphate’s conception of empire and its implementation strategy on the one hand, and local reception empire on the other. A team with the necessary linguistic skills will produce several microhistorical studies exploring some key questions for the Umayyad caliphate and the functioning of early medieval empires: the balance between coercion and negotiation, the role of archives in establishing power, the indigenous reception of empire. In this key period of ostensible power display by the Umayyads, the documents found in rural Aphrodito mention such projects as the building of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus and demonstrate how they affected tiny villages in a different province, providing a textbook case of global microhistory.

Mots-clés : papyrology,medieval egypt,umayyad caliphate,coptic studies,indigeneity,empire studies,late antiquity
Projet ERC : Bright BHBs (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
Entité participante : Institute of Science and Technology Austria — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ISTA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2649807.0 €

Combining electromagnetic (EM) and gravitational-wave (GW) observations of the same object opens windows to new science, from astronomy and astrophysics to fundamental physics and cosmology. The era of such multi-messenger astrophysics began with the recent GW+EM discovery of two binary neutron-star mergers. This proposal will enable novel multi-messenger science with black hole binaries (BHBs) across all masses.  Supermassive and stellar-mass BHBs in galactic nuclei are both expected to be surrounded by circumbinary gas disks. The binary's orbit and the hydrodynamics of its disk are coupled and their evolution must be followed jointly. Our goal is to understand this coupled long-term evolution of BHB+disk systems, along with their corresponding EM and GW signatures.  This is an exceptionally well-posed physics problem. We will solve it through hydrodynamical and MHD simulations of unprecedented size, spatial resolution and duration, incorporating radiation transport, realistic thermodynamics, gravitational radiation and disk self-gravity for the first time. We will predict the EM and GW signatures of BHBs with circumbinary disks throughout their evolution, and apply these to observations in three work packages (WPs).  WP1 will perform 2D hydro and 3D radiation-MHD simulations to understand the orbital evolution and the EM and GW signatures of BHBs with circumbinary disks.  WP2 will apply these results to robustly identify the first SMBH binaries among AGNs in LSST and other time-domain surveys, and to interpret pulsar-timing array observations of the GW background.  WP3 will develop the first self-consistent time-dependent models of AGN disks coupled with the embedded populations of stellar-mass objects, and derive the EM and GW signatures of stellar-mass BH mergers in these disks.  The tools we build will also allow ESA's LISA mission to realize its full science potential, by enabling the astrophysical interpretation of any deviations from vacuum GR waveforms.

Mots-clés : time domain astronomy,binaries,active galactic nuclei agn,agn variability
Projet ERC : qScope (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Institut Karolinska — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

The goal of biological research is to understand how life works. Although progress is fast, there seems to be an infinity of things we do not understand. When it comes to understanding tissue from the bottom up, our knowledge leaves much to desire. Feynman claimed that “It is very easy to answer many of these fundamental biological questions; you just look at the thing!” well the problem is that looking at the thing is the problem. Microscopy might never give us the possibility to directly see DNA- or RNA-sequence. For this, the community has evolved extraordinarily powerful sequencers. Today one man can routinely read millions of sequences on a weekly basis. And likely soon, we will read billions of sequences daily in small labs. But this, in itself, will not allow us to just look at the thing. We argue in this proposal, that by using the sequencer itself as a microscope, we will get that much closer to actually see what is going on in biological systems.  Researchers have started in this direction by coupling microscopy- and sequencing-data from the same sample, but that is a temporary solution. Here, we propose a technology for inferring images using sequencing data alone, bypassing the need for advanced microscopy and leveraging the potential of the exponential growth of sequencing technology.  We use DNA seeds and perform a reaction in-situ that allow these seeds to copy themselves locally. This is analogous to phylogenetic reconstruction, but instead of inferring ancestry, we infer relations of amplicons to spatial locations in tissue. By using a unique approach, we derive spatial information connected to RNA transcript information directly in-situ, allowing for a non-targeted spatial transcriptomics technique that is as simple as running a PCR. When successful, this approach will then enable us, and others, to learn the inner secrets of biological system at a significantly faster rate.

Mots-clés : spatial transcriptomics,dna molecular tools,dna nanotechnology,sequencing