Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : AuditeMatrem (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Université de Bergen — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999740.0 €

Pregnancy is a unique time of life where mother and child live in symbiosis. This relationship however induces multiple symptoms for mothers including nausea, vomiting, bleeding, pain, fatigue and many more. In their majority, symptoms pass without adverse consequences and are thus understudied. Instead of a temporary inconvenience, what if maternal symptoms were the key to understanding and preventing harmful consequences for both mother and child?  So far, research on pregnancy has primarily focused on complications, maternal survival, and fetal health. Very little is known on the biological underpinnings of the wide range of symptoms mothers experience in the first half of pregnancy, leaving families and healthcare professionals inadequately informed about potential health consequences. Nausea and vomiting is a notable exception, where fetally-expressed proteins have recently been demonstrated to cause maternal symptoms. My recent research has further disentangled the respective contributions of the fetal and maternal genomes and characterized the trajectory of genetic signals over time. In addition, my team has established innovative approaches to study proteins accounting for haplotypic variation, paving the way for new research on how symptoms are mediated between mother and child. These findings open the opportunity to turn the tables, give overlooked maternal symptoms long overdue scientific attention, and unlock their potential in antenatal care.  I hereby propose the creation of a new research framework that will 1) establish pregnancy profiles based on maternal symptoms, 2) reveal their genetic and proteomic underpinnings through the establishment of novel proteogenomic methods, and 3) resolve how maternal symptoms link to pregnancy complications and later health of mother and child. This transformative project will close a long-standing knowledge gap, opening novel research avenues for the study of pregnancy and its consequences for mothers and children.

Mots-clés : pregnancy
Projet ERC : 5-D (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Université de Bergen — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

How can we recognize that a person with dementia is at the end of life? When we are dying, our physical, mental, and social abilities are gradually declining. No reliable method of predicting perceived dying currently exists although the technology is available (sensors, algorithms). The aim of Decoding Death and Dying in Dementia by Digital thanotyping (5-D) is to provide methods and tools to diagnose and describe dying to an unprecedented level of accuracy and robustness, within a timespan larger than is possible now, focusing on the case of dying people with dementia as one of the most vulnerable and difficult to study groups. 5-D combines clinical assessment tools with wearable sensing technology to monitor a) pain and distressing symptoms, b) behavioral and psychological symptoms in dementia (BPSD), c) oral changes, and to decode “the point of no return” as the beginning of perceived dying. To obtain this outcome in nursing home patients with dementia, I will test the main hypothesis: from monitoring the evolution of thanotype components over time and their interdependencies, the prediction of the “point of no return” is possible. The objectives of 5-D are: O1. Collect data using sensors and validated assessment scales. O2. Develop estimation methods for BPSD from sensor measurements. O3. Develop digital tools to capture the expression of pain. O4. Determine the relationship between breathing and oral symptoms. O5. Develop models for symptom interdependencies at the end of life and the “point of no return”. O6. Perform human-in-the-loop validation of developed tools, models, and algorithms.  The ground-breaking interdisciplinary novelty of 5-D endeavors to enhance our understanding of end-of-life underlying pain and symptoms in people with dementia. Advancing our theoretical knowledge to uncover how, when, and why perceived dying can be identified opens the doors for transferable research across several scientific fields.

Mots-clés : wearable devices,pain and distressing symptoms at the end of life,systems modeling,human in the loop validation
Projet ERC : CHIRAL (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : Nederlandse organisatie voor wetenschappelijk onderzoek — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : NWO
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2415625.0 €

The molecular building blocks of life are of only one handedness. Consequently, pharmaceuticals and other bioactive molecules also need to be of one handedness. When such enantiomers crystallize in separate crystals, isolation of the desired handedness is relatively straightforward. Unfortunately, most enantiomers (90-95%) are thermodynamically more stable as racemic compounds with both enantiomers in the crystallographic unit cell, which impedes any such separations. There are currently no methods to systematically overcome this major bottleneck, thus hindering simple routes towards many essential enantiopure molecules. This proposal is aimed at overcoming this fundamental challenge by establishing new principles to turn racemic compounds into molecules of a desired handedness by liberating them from their thermodynamic constraints. To achieve this ambitious goal, we introduce a revolutionary new approach: manipulating the stability of crystals by subjecting mixtures of crystals to non-equilibrium conditions. Building upon our preliminary work, we hypothesize that growth/dissolution rates can be manipulated by selecting crystallization conditions such that the thermodynamically stable racemic compound is converted into the desired enantiomer. To achieve this ambitious goal, the main objectives of this proposal are to: (i) demonstrate the proof-of-principle, (ii) identify the essential parameters, and (iii) understand the mechanism behind this methodology. The results of this ERC Consolidator will hold direct relevance for our fundamental understanding of non-equilibrium conditions in reactive crystallizations, and the outcomes of this research will immediately impact our ability to produce molecules of single handedness. Ultimately, this breakthrough holds the potential to disrupt the pharmaceutical industry by offering versatile, sustainable, and simple routes towards essential enantiomerically pure building blocks that are crucial in our daily lives.

Mots-clés : chirality,crystallisation,enantiomers
Projet ERC : MISTiQ-Light (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Sorbonne Université — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Sorbonne U
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Photons are great carriers of information but they usually don’t interact with one another. Atoms interact but are hard to manipulate and do not benefit from the toolbox of quantum optics for detecting quantum fluctuations and entanglement.  Many approaches have been proposed to marry these two systems for quantum simulation of condensed matter with strongly interacting photons, but to date, the realization of large-scale synthetic materials made of optical photons is still missing.  My project targets this exciting goal, namely the creation of synthetic photonic matter. It relies on the original approach of engineering a quantum phase transition in a fluid of light.  Specifically, I will investigate the superfluid to Mott insulator transition for light propagating in a dense cold atomic cloud. Photons will acquire an effective mass due to the paraxial approximation and I will generate and tune the strong photon-photon interactions via a giant Kerr non-linearity induced by manipulating atomic coherences. In this regime, photons will behave as a quantum fluid of light and follow an evolution similar to ultracold atomic quantum gases.  My original hypothesis is that a fluid of light should undergo the same phase transition, driven by quantum fluctuations, as quantum gases do, and that a many-body state of light will emerge from this transition.  At the fundamental level, a Mott insulator state of light allows for exploring truly quantum effects such as the emergence of analogue of phase transition in non-equilibrium systems, the presence of quantum depletion and pre-thermal states and the entanglement dynamics in many-body systems. On the applied side, a photonic Mott insulator is a giant source of single photons (or any Fock state) with potentially several hundreds of lattice sites delivering tunable photon number-states in parallel. It will be a game changer for scalability issues in photonics quantum technologies.
Projet ERC : SupraSense (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HGF
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1994069.0 €

SupraSense combines completely new strategies to design and realize biomimetic artificial receptors for bioactive small molecules, i.e. metabolites, with the aim of overcoming long-standing selectivity and sensitivity limitations that hindered other synthetic sensory systems from reaching diagnostic applications. Sophisticated yet easy to fabricate “SupraSensors” will be developed based on unprecedented hybrid zeolitic materials whose binding cavities are modulated by peptide-based cofactors, thereby mimicking enzyme pockets. SupraSensors will be functional and directly applicable for molecular diagnostics in urine, saliva, and blood and will be of utility in point-of-care units and personal homes. Emphasis is given to the detection of metabolites that are important disease indicators. I am an expert on “conventional” synthetic chemosensors and have studied both their merits and fundamental shortcomings. Out of this deep routed analysis, I developed the proposed ambitious strategy that marries principles of molecular recognition with materials science and chemistry-informed deep learning. These SupraSensors will advance the field through the following elements: i) high-energy water release from microporous materials ensures high binding affinity; ii) strategically placed peptide-based recognition elements provide selectivity while offering synthetic tunability; iii) information-rich signal output from SupraSensor libraries enables metabolite distinction in biofluids; iv) novel signal amplification concepts increase sensitivity. SupraSensor discovery will be fast and generalizable to many metabolite classes. SupraSense has the potential to unleash supreme opportunities for multiparameter diagnostics, which will be essential for patient subgrouping based on metabolic phenotypes. The new concepts developed herein have the prospect to revolutionize early detection of emerging cardiovascular events, inflammations, sepsis, and other metabolic or aging-associated diseases.

Mots-clés : supramolecualr chemistry,sensing,molecular diagnostics,materials and assay development,deep learning
Projet ERC : DYNATT (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Trinity College — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2109549.0 €

How much flavour do we give up in pursuit of a healthier choice, and how many extra minutes of commute do we sacrifice in fostering a more sustainable future? Daily decisions involve navigating multiattribute tradeoffs by assigning weights to different attributes. Understanding the mechanisms underlying attribute weighting is key to explaining and predicting choice behaviour. However, these mechanisms are poorly understood. Past research has examined how people adjust attribute weights in response to shifts in goals or in the context. Beyond induced shifts, it is unknown whether attribute weights maintain stability in stationary contexts, from one decision to the next. My central hypothesis is that, akin to other representations in the brain (e.g., memories), attribute weights are in constant flux, being controlled by inherently noisy and dynamical processes. This project aims to unravel these processes.  Attribute weights are inherently subjective and not directly observable. Reading them out from single choices is impossible, as choices are perturbed by noise and influenced by normatively irrelevant factors. To overcome this limitation, I will use multiattribute choice tasks with magnetoencephalography and, focusing on decision-relevant neural signals, I will separate the influence of attribute weights from the distorting influence of irrelevant factors. This will enable me to read-out attribute weights at each decision, and to subsequently chart their temporal dynamics across successive multiattribute decisions.  Understanding the dynamics of attribute weighting will offer mechanistic insights on how preferences change, informing century-old debates on the nature of preferences. These insights will be valuable to clinicians seeking to understand pathological preference variability or persistence (e.g., in addiction); and to policy makers probing whether specific consumer tradeoffs (e.g., between monetary and environmental attributes) are stable or changeable.

Mots-clés : decision making attention multiattribute choice choice dynamics preferential choice magnetoencephalography cognitive neuroscience
Projet ERC : PROMISE (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Molecules of Life: B iological  Mechanisms , Structures  and Functions
Entité participante : Sorbonne Université — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Sorbonne U
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1952762.5 €

Proteins are essential and incredibly versatile actors for all biological processes in living organisms. Massive amounts of data describing their amino acid sequences and 3D shapes are now openly accessible. Yet, we still know little about how they interact and function with one another in vivo. Nor how they diversified throughout evolution to orchestrate highly specialised behavioural traits. This ERC CoG proposal, PROMISE, meets the urgent need for decrypting protein sequences and structures toward guiding biological intervention. It will assess and harness the protein variations naturally occurring in multi-cellular organisms to unlock critical questions across developmental, evolutionary, and molecular biology: - What are the sites in a protein crucial for selecting its cellular partners and binding to them? How can they be modified toward modulating protein functioning? - How did the proteomes responsible for the ability of humans and zebra finches to learn "language" from their peers expand in evolution? Are there convergent amino acid patterns, beyond the striking analogies in the underlying anatomical structures and in gene expression and regulation? PROMISE will leverage the tension between evolutionary divergence, gene duplication, and alternative splicing by combining massive high-throughput protein-related data integration and cutting-edge artificial intelligence techniques. It will bring a paradigm shift on assessing protein diversity and its impact on rewiring interaction networks in evolution. The expected results will provide efficient and scalable solutions to extract biological meaning from big data and transform it into interpretable and actionable models. This new knowledge will be transferable to a broad range of impactful societal issues, such as the inter-individual variability in disease susceptibility, the design of more specific drugs and more bio-compatible de novo proteins, or strategising human adaptation to climate change.

Mots-clés : protein evolution,alternative splicing,proteome diversity,representation learning,deep learning,bioinformatics,computational biology,genomics,transcriptomics,proteomics,molecular modelling,protein design,comparative biology,vocal learning
Projet ERC : LITHO3 (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Trinity College — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1944116.0 €

The formation of the Archean lithosphere was a key event in Earth history, resulting in the construction of the first continents, or cratons. The lithosphere formed by extensive mantle melting, however, there are conflicting models for the environment in which melting took place. Efforts to understand the formation of the cratonic lithosphere are hampered by a lack of quantitative information on the depth of mantle melting and the original thickness of the Archean lithosphere. Exsolved orthopyroxenes within peridotite xenoliths and silicate inclusions in diamond hold the key to constraining these critical parameters. We will reconstruct the original compositions of an extensive collection of exsolved orthopyroxenes and use our recently published thermodynamic model to calculate their formation pressures and temperatures. This innovative approach will reveal the depth extent of Archean melting. We will provide the first constraints on the vertical extent of the lithosphere in the Archean using geothermal gradients calculated from dated diamond inclusions. To achieve this, we will perform cutting edge laser ablation U-Pb dating of garnet inclusions, this challenging application has yielded promising results for xenolithic garnet. Observations will be complemented by new experiments using fertile, depleted and silica-enriched compositions, coupled with with thermodynamic modelling, which will lead to a better understanding of phase relations during peridotite melting. The origin and significance of silica enrichment is poorly understood. We will conduct melt-rock reaction experiments to test the hypothesis that silica addition occurred via interaction with ascending komatiite melt. We will thus address several fundamental issues: the depth of Archean mantle melting; the origin of silica enrichment; and the link between cratonic peridotite and komatiite magma. LITHO3 will provide unprecedented insight into the formation and evolution of the cratonic lithosphere.

Mots-clés : lithosphere,craton,exsolution
Projet ERC : MAWiCS (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
Entité participante : Université de Technologie de Kaiserslautern — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TUK
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999406.0 €

Spintronic devices perform information storage and processing based on the spin degree of freedom. Materials with complex magnetic order, such as ferrimagnets, antiferromagnets and chiral magnets are promising candidates for next-generation spintronic devices with ultrafast speed, enhanced robustness and unique functionalities. However, several fundamental obstacles prevent their efficient control with established approaches based on magnetic fields and electrical currents.  MAWiCS will overcome these obstacles by introducing the magneto-acoustic control of magnetization in these complex spin systems. The advantage of MAWiCS’ approach is based on the following hypotheses: Microwave frequency phonons can excite and control antiferromagnetic spin waves and magnetic skyrmions lattices with high efficiency. The uniaxial magnetic anisotropy induced by magneto-acoustic interactions can be used for full modulation of antiferromagnetic resonance frequencies. Magneto-acoustic waves can propagate in topologically protected skyrmion lattice edge-states with reduced magnetic damping. MAWiCS will develop innovative experimental approaches to take advantage of symmetry, topology and exchange-enhancement effects for highly efficient control of spin dynamics in complex spin systems. Consequently, MAWiCS’ results will allow for the first time to: 1) Generate nanoscale spin waves from acoustic pulses in ferrimagnets and antiferromagnets. 2) Control skyrmions by acoustic lattices and realize nanoscale topological acoustics 3) Excite and detect antiferromagnetic spin waves by acoustic two-tone modulation MAWiCS’ results will pave the way for the technological realization of magneto-acoustic spintronic devices, enable antiferromagnetic magnonics and realize topological magnon transport. Ultimately, MAWiCS will thus pioneer a new class of information technology concepts that do not only offer increased performance but also novel functionalities.

Mots-clés : antiferromagnets,magnetic skyrmions,spin waves,magneto acoustic,surface acoustic wave,magnonics
Projet ERC : ULTIMASero (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Institut Pasteur — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1150000.0 €

Enormous progress is being made in the fight against parasitic diseases such as malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, which is driving a long-term epidemiological shift in the burden of infectious diseases. Until recently, most febrile patients presenting to rural health facilities were presumptively treated for malaria. However, the decline in malaria cases coupled with the roll out of rapid diagnostic tests has revealed a substantial burden of non-malaria fevers. I hypothesise that the predominant disease burden in Africa is changing from parasites to viruses, and that the diversity of infecting pathogens is increasing over time.  ULTIMASero aims to investigate long-term trends in the epidemiology of infectious diseases by taking a multi-pathogen approach using multiplex serological and molecular assays, epidemiological studies, and statistical modelling. This will be achieved through four aims: (i) Investigate febrile patients in longitudinal studies in Senegal, Cameroon, and Madagascar; (ii) Develop a multiplex serological assay for viral, parasitic, and bacterial pathogens in Africa; (iii) Create statistical and machine learning tools for multiplex data; and (iv) Implement sero-epidemiological analyses of long-term trends in infectious disease in general populations.  The key technological output will be a multiplex serological assay using Luminex bead-based technology to measure antibodies to infectious diseases transmitted in Africa. The assay will test small volume blood samples for antibodies to >300 antigens from >100 pathogens. We will test samples from prospective cohorts of febrile patients to provide an in-depth assessment of the burden of febrile illness, and from 50,000 biobanked samples dating back over 30 years to assess long-term trends in multi-pathogen epidemiology in the general population.  The knowledge generated from this interdisciplinary project will have major implications for how we study, track, prevent and treat febrile illness in Africa.

Mots-clés : infectious disease epidemiology serological diagnostics malaria statistical models machine learning surveillance fever