Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : leuCAB (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université Louis-et-Maximilien de Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LMU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The current treatment landscape for leukemia, particularly concerning AML (acute myeloid leukemia) and MDS (myelodysplastic syndrome), is constrained by the instability of hypomethylating agents which are regularly used in elderly, medically non-fit patients (high-risk). This instability restricts their spectrum of application, leaving a significant gap in effective treatment options. Despite research into alternative therapeutic approaches the need for a mild treatment option with high success rates in this patient population remains unmet.  Carbacitabin (CAB) emerges as a promising solution to these challenges. This novel epigenetically active compound exhibits enhanced stability against hydrolytic cleavage and enzymatic metabolization. In AML PDX mouse models, CAB demonstrates significantly improved efficacy and vastly reduced toxicity, making it an optimal candidate for leukemia treatment, particularly for those high-risk patients.  Funding from the ERC PoC aims to support essential preclinical steps towards fully realizing the potential of CAB. Those include, further optimization of the lead structure of CAB to enhance targeting and thorough preclinical studies to evaluate the safety and efficacy of CAB. Additionally, scaling up the synthesis of CAB is crucial to meet the demand for large-scale production required for preclinical and subsequent clinical trials. Furthermore, efforts to solidify intellectual property (IP) protection and conduct an in-depth freedom-to-operate (FTO) analysis are necessary to safeguard CAB's market position. Establishing a spin-off company dedicated to the clinical studies of CAB will require engagement with essential stakeholders, including potential investors, pharmaceutical partners, legal advisors, and regulatory consultants during leuCAB. This comprehensive approach will ensure the effective translation of CAB from bench to bedside, bringing new hope to patients, especially those battling AML and MDS.
Projet ERC : PROTaX (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université Louis-et-Maximilien de Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LMU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

This project aims to develop an innovative protein therapy to combat Xylella fastidiosa (Xf), a plant pathogen causing significant economic losses in high-value crops such as olive, grapevine, almond, and blueberries.  Xf has particularly impacted agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin, with the widespread decline of ancient olive groves in southern Italy serving as a prominent example. Current management strategies are ineffective, underscoring the need for novel disease control solutions - an issue central to the MultiX grant on Xf virulence and plant immunity.  Our key inventive step is based on the hypothesis that the phytomicrobiome of a non-host plant contains factors that inhibit Xf. Through experiments and proteomics, we have identified a protein that demonstrates inhibitory activity against Xf. This protein shows significant promise and, with further refinement and optimization, could be developed into an effective therapy.  Building on this discovery, PROTaX will design an effective therapeutic and demonstrated its potential to manage Xf infections. Furthermore, we will have gained a deeper understanding of market interests.

Mots-clés : xylella fastidiosa,microbiome
Projet ERC : TexSoRVA (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université technique d'Istanbul — Pays : Turquie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

In this ERC Proof of Concept project, we aim to advance the development of a wearable soft robotic device, named TexSoRVA, designed for haptic feedback and motion tracking. This device will feature seamlessly integrated sensing, actuation, and self-powering capabilities, all achieved through innovative digital machine-knitting techniques. Our primary demonstration will be a soft robotic haptic glove intended for virtual reality (VR) applications. TexSoRVA builds upon the foundational technology developed in the ERC-funded TEXWEAROTS project, which successfully created a knitted robotic glove that eliminates the need for bulky components like air valves while incorporating integrated actuation and sensing functionalities. Our objective is to evaluate user engagement and business processes by creating technical feasibility demonstrators. These will showcase TexSoRVA's potential applications across various market segments, including entertainment, physical therapy, and sports. By progressing from Technology Readiness Level 3 to levels 4 or 5, this project will significantly enhance our technology's maturity and readiness. This advancement will position us to apply for an EIC Transition funding opportunity, enabling further development and validation in a broader context. To our knowledge, no other textile-based haptic technology for virtual reality applications has achieved this level of maturity and readiness, making this project a uniquely promising opportunity in the field.
Projet ERC : iPYRO (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Hannover Medical School — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MHH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The iPYRO proposal is built upon the uniqueness of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) and recent innovations in the farming of fully defined human macrophages (iMonoMac) using industry compatible bioreactors. Given the growing need for industrial macrophages, iPYRO sets an innovation in the forefront of drug safety evaluations, supplying a unique cell type, which meets the expectations from industry and regulators. The breakthrough innovation of iPYRO will offer a superior, thus highly standardized, economically produced and fully validated “off-the-shelf” macrophage-based cell product to revolutionize the safety of drugs and beyond. To maximize the outcome, iPYRO will assess the regulatory compliance, while further streamlining the iMonoMac product for the envisioned spinout, establishing a proper freedom-to-operate strategy and a suitable business model. The seminal iMonoMac platform along the unique IPR and established contacts to industrial and regulatory stakeholders will pave the transition from academia to industry, introducing for the very first time an iPSC-cell product for the drug safety market market.
Projet ERC : iMAClung (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Hannover Medical School — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MHH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Harnessing the immune system to combat global diseases has introduced a new era in modern medicine. The iMAClung proposal will extend this concept and will pave the way for the first immune cell-based therapy to combat bacterial airway infections. With more than 2 million deaths around the world in 2020, lower respiratory tract infections are still the deadliest communicable disease with unmet medical need, highlighting the necessity for radical new approaches to develop therapeutic avenues. The iMAClung proposal aims at the adoptive transfer of human macrophages directly into the infected lung and to restore the endogenous alveolar macrophage (AM) cell pool to efficiently resolve bacterial airway infections and to mediate lung regeneration at the same time. iMAClung will harness the unique features of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) to use macrophages (iMonoMac) as a cell-based immunotherapy following the adoptive transfer of these cells directly to the side of pulmonary infection. iMAClung is built upon the pioneering work of the ERC-Stg “iPSC2Therapy”, in which the anti-bacterial activity of iMonoMac against a variety of pulmonary (myco)bacterial infections has been successfully demonstrated in vivo. In addition, “iPSC2Therapy” has also successful shown the first scalable production of “off-the-shelf” iMonoMac using industry compatible bioreactors, which now paves the way for the development of seminal (non)therapeutic concepts. To enable clinical transfer, iMAClung will build a team of medical, scientific and industrial experts, all dedicated to bring iMonoMac into humans. To enter the next stage of the clinical translation pipeline, a path towards the clinics will be developed, which will facilitate subsequent exploitation and transfer into patients. iMAClung will bridge the seminal therapeutic concept from bench to bedside, having broad value for patients, society, medical personal, and the healthcare/biopharmaceutical industry within Europe and beyond.
Projet ERC : CertiCar (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université Louis-et-Maximilien de Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LMU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Autonomous driving is a dominant technological theme of the 21st century, with vehicles from various car manufacturers equipped with different levels of autonomy. However, the implementation of safe and reliable control software remains a critical challenge for car manufacturers before fully autonomous vehicles become a reality. The current lack of reliability in autonomous vehicle software is mainly attributed to the absence of formal correctness. Design requirements are not expressed in a formal language, leading to ambiguity and false implementations. Furthermore, human factors from engineers to developers increase the likelihood of errors, and testing scenarios are limited, leaving many edge cases untested. Immature control software leading to accidents undermines public trust in autonomous vehicles and impedes further development. We propose leveraging our ongoing ERC project AutoCPS research to create robust, reliable, and formally correct automotive control software. CertiCar proposes a software development framework that automates control software generation and guarantees its robustness and reliability. A reliable advanced collision avoidance system (ACAS) is a fundamental requirement for future autonomous vehicles, significantly reducing the number of accidents, injuries, and fatalities. CertiCar's PoC project aims to provide a correct-by-design ACAS with guaranteed correctness, reducing testing time by several orders of magnitude for car companies, and represents an initial step toward a complete software stack for a certifiable autonomous car.

Mots-clés : advanced driver assistance systems,collision avoidance systems,safety,formal methods
Projet ERC : MagMech (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
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 : 143000.0 €

The mechanobiology of cells and tissues plays an essential role in physiology and diseases. This emerging field at the frontier between physics, engineering and biology, heavily relies on precise and versatile devices to apply and measure mechanical forces within and around cells and tissues. However the current commercial landscape is restricted to few systems that are limited to a small range of forces and poorly compatible with large tissues and embryos. In the FORCASTER ERC Consolidator project, our team invented a magnetic tweezer system which allows to apply large calibrated forces on magnetic particles embedded within cells and tissues, or at their surface, which largely overcome the limits of the current commercially available devices. In the MagMech PoC we will: (i) perform key technological updates to improve the versatility, stability and precision of the device; (ii) Gather proof of concept data in multiple relevant tissues, organs and embryos to support its broad potential for studying the mechanobiology of cells and tissues in a variety of physiological and disease contexts and; (iii) Starting from the recent filling of a patent, perform market evaluations, including KOLs and end-users interviews, establish partnerships with different industrial sectors, as well as consider the creation of a start-up to support the commercialization of this technology in the near future. With this PoC project, we will thus assess the value proposition that the magnetic tweezer system developed in FORCASTER ERC project can be brought to the market, serving as a key alternative to the existing commercial systems, for applying and measuring forces within and around cells and tissues.
Projet ERC : ELYSSA (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
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 : 150000.0 €

ELectoral information and analYSis System for the enhancement of democrAcy. Building on the expertise in electoral analysis developed within the ERC TARICA (Political and Socio-institutional Change in North Africa), the ELYSSA project (ELectoral information and analYSis System for the enhancement of democracy) aims at facilitating access to electoral information by providing different categories of users (NGOs, media, political actors, cooperation institutions) with tools for the analysis of voting and political change in the post-2011 Maghreb. The project consists in the development of a tool for exploration, visualization and analysis of electoral data. The ELYSSA platform will allow for in-depth, multi-scalar analysis of electoral results, the establishment of electoral time series and dynamic electoral analyses, as well as correlation analyses between voting results and socio-economic data. The proposed analysis tools address a variety of needs, enabling users to manipulate election data autonomously to form independent opinions and make informed decisions.
Projet ERC : PhotoElectroFlow (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Göttingen — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : GAU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The EU strongly strives for a sustainability transformation, and the EU Commission's Green Deal accelerates climate neutrality by 2050, with a modern and competitive economy. Climate neutrality of the chemical industries calls for innovative resource- and energy-economical technologies to harvest renewable forms of energy and prevent chemical waste. Breakthrough studies demonstrated the unique potential of harnessing both solar and electrical energy for sustainable syntheses. Thereby, chemical waste formation can be minimized, while enabling innovative scenarios that neither electrochemistry nor photochemistry can achieve. Specifically, the merger of photoelectrochemically-enabled molecular assembly with the cathodic hydrogen formation constitutes ideal resource-economic synthesis. Unfortunately, photoelectrocatalysis continues to be limited to reactions on small mmol lab-scale, preventing the translation of recent exciting trends to the next level of industrial process scale. The absence of a commercially available reactor represents a major limitation to unleash the full potential of photoelectrochemical chemistry for practitioners. The transfer to continuous flow bears great opportunities for photoelectrochemistry in chemical, agrochemical and pharmaceutical industries. The overarching objective of PhotoElectroFlow is to devise a first continuous flow electrolyzer for scalable photoelectrochemical transformations in a safe and robust manner on gram to kilogram scale. Thus, we will provide a most-user-friendly technology, closely collaborating with partners in industry, to harvest the unique synergy of light and electricity. Evaluation of the PhotoElectroFlow electrolyzer will be benchmarked in molecular transformations of practical importance to chemists in academia as well as in pharmaceutical, agrochemical and chemical industries. The devise will be patented and represents the foundation for a start-up initiative towards circular carbon-neutral industries.
Projet ERC : ReverseTheAdvantage (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Maastricht — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Hypoxia-activated prodrugs (HAPs) are a great concept in particular in association therapies more efficient on well-oxygenated cells, such as immunotherapies. CP-506 is a third generation HAP with optimal PK for which we confirmed in more than 20 tumor models that presence of tumor hypoxia is a requisite for prodrug activation. We already had an AI/radiomics-based proprietary IP on a solution to identify hypoxia from standard imaging. Another important determinant for efficacy was the presence of a defective homologous recombination (HRD), a pathway needed to repair the DNA damage of the alkylating warhead of CP-506. A genome-wide mutational scar-based pan-cancer Classifier of HOmologous Recombination Deficiency (CHORD, available open source) is able to detect HRD better as compared to assessing mutation of key genes. It is therefore essential to have a validated software solution integrating both biomarkers. This solution, further developed in this project, will be able to capture intrapatient heterogeneity and make a outcome prediction per patient and per lesion.
Projet ERC : Politus (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université Koç — Pays : Turquie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The Politus Project will assess the commercial viability of proprietary natural language processing and machine learning technology for AI-based data-driven fair social policymaking. The project will verify the innovation potential of computational social science and policy-related novel methods from the PI’s ERC-funded Emerging Welfare Project (https://emw.ku.edu.tr). To deliver the technical and commercial proof of concept, the PI will establish the Politus Analytics Company, which will offer an AI-based data platform and fair data-driven policymaking consultancy services to two main client personas - political parties and municipalities. The Politus Project will address two interconnected problems of opposition political parties and municipalities in Turkey and other emerging markets regarding social policy making: (1) populist governments gain political advantage by abusing public social policies with the aid of big data, which disables opposition parties and municipalities to develop competitive electoral strategies (2) These big data sources are not available to non-governmental stakeholders, including opposition parties and municipalities, indicating a government-led information gap which opposition parties and municipalities cannot fill with traditional survey polling methods. The Politus project will develop an AI-based innovation that combines quantitative and computational methods in order to create a data platform that delivers representative, valid, instant, real-time, multi-country and multi-language panel data on key political and social trends, which will be used to design fair social policies for opposition parties and municipalities. Politus will serve its clients (municipalities and political parties) (i) the data and tools to pinpoint exact discretionary and clientelistic allocation of social policies (ii) data and insight to understand the needs and wants of the citizens and gain electoral advantage and (iii) the design of fair social policies.
Projet ERC : RAMP-UP (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université Bilkent — Pays : Turquie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : BİLKENT
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Microplastics pollution is becoming increasingly problematic due to its involvement in a myriad of health problems and its effects on natural wildlife. Water agencies across the globe are progressively implementing screening policies for drinking water to address this issue. However, this is proving to be challenging since the existing monitoring technologies are labor intensive and time-consuming with low throughput. To address the issue, we propose a new flow-through sensor that builds upon technologies that were developed during our main ERC project. The sensor device combines two different electronic sensors that extract both the size and the dielectric permittivity of microparticles passing through the system in a rapid and high throughput manner. The dielectric permittivity is a robust parameter that can be used to identify plastics from other materials found naturally in the environment. By utilizing this difference at the single microparticle level, our new technology can be used either to eliminate non-plastic materials from samples for down-stream conventional microplastics spectroscopy, or as a stand-alone automated sensor for rapid microplastics quantification in drinking water samples. Here, we will set up a microplastics workbench to cross-validate the accuracy of our proposed technology. After validation and securing the IP rights, we will seek out drinking water samples from water boards across the globe to analyze them in our lab. This will allow us to form networks of collaborators and lead us towards providing rapid microplastics analysis as a commercial service to water regulation agencies. In addition to the potential economic opportunities, we envision that our technology will accelerate microplastics screening and play a significant role in stymieing the spread of microplastics pollution.
Projet ERC : HIPECO2 (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
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 : 150000.0 €

The electrochemical conversion of CO2 to chemical fuels is a promising technology for recycling CO2 and closing the carbon cycle. Amon the different products of the electrochemical reduction of CO2, multicarbon (C2+) product are more desirable because of their high energy density and high market price. Among them, ethylene is widely used for the production of raw materials and has a market price around 1000€/tons, which suggests relatively low threshold towards profitability. The development of such a technology to convert CO2 to C2H4 is however limited by the lack of selectivity and efficient catalysts to drive the reaction, while CO2 mass transportation to the active sites limits the conversion rate. During the course of our ERC-StG 2D-4-CO2, we have developed Cu-based electrocatalysts modified with aromatic functions, which demonstrated strongly improved selectivity for ethylene at industry relevant current density of 300 mA cm-2. The aim of the HIPCEO2 project is to apply the novel Cu-based catalyst develop in our group in a high-pressure membrane electrode assembly electrolyzer. Our specific goals are to realize a prototype with electrode size of 100 cm2 and verified stability of 1000 hours that will be used as a demonstrator to reach out potentials end-users and future partners.