Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : UR4energy (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université norvégienne de sciences et de technologie — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 50000.0 €

The renewable energy input in the grid is not sufficient to cover the European energy demand, which largely still depends on fossil fuels. To reach the goal of climate neutrality by 2050, Europe needs to diversify and improve the adoption of renewable energy technologies. A yet-untapped source of energy can be found in the ocean. While wave and tidal energy have been explored, the reliable and predictable vortex wake energy has not been harvested yet as a renewable energy source. UR4energy will tap into this energy source by developing an efficient way to harvest it by using Underwater Robots. In this project, Prof. Pettersen will prove the technical and commercial feasibility of an underwater robot for ocean energy harvesting. Prof. Pettersen’s group will integrate the expertise of two partners, i.e., Inventas AS and NTNU Technology Transfer AS, for the development of the prototype and the monitoring of the patent landscape, respectively. UR4energy contributes to the ocean energy market, one of the fastest growing renewable energy markets (CAGR 2022-2030 = 33.5%) with a versatile technology that has the potential to support the EU’s independence from fossil fuels, while contributing to research on robotics and autonomy for underwater robots.
Projet ERC : Topo Insulator VCSEL (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Technion - Institut de technologie d'Israël — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers (VCSELs) are tiny semiconductor lasers, structured as pillars of few-microns diameter on a chip, emitting light from their surface. They are now the most commonly used lasers, e.g., in cell phones, car sensors, data transmission in fiber optic networks. Though widely used, the miniscule size of VCSELs sets a stringent limit on the output power it can generate. For years, scientists have sought to enhance the power emitted by such devices through combining many tiny VCSELs and attempting to force them to act as a single coherent laser, with limited success. In a recent breakthrough, which appeared in Science magazine, we presented a new scheme to force very many VCSELs to lock together and act as a single coherent laser source. Our breakthrough, a direct outcome of our ERC AdG, employs a unique geometrical arrangement of VCSELs on the chip that forces the light to move in a specific path – a photonic topological insulator platform.  We propose to capitalize on the success and construct proof of concept technology that will bring this topological insulator VCSEL array a major step towards commercialization. We will design and construct a highly efficient VCSEL array on a novel topological platform optimized for reliability and scalability to large numbers of emitters, where all the emitters act as a single laser. The topological VCSEL array will be pumped electrically, operating at room temperature, and rely on quantum well optimized for emitting high power per emitter. We will define the topological insulator geometry with a reflectivity-modulation scheme that ensures reliability. Our proposed scheme, anticipated to be ready within 18 months, is scalable to a large number of VCSELs and will be a game changer in a plethora of technologies. It will pave the way to new applications that require orders of magnitude higher laser power while maintaining high coherence. It can revolutionize many applications we use in daily life.
Projet ERC : UNBIAS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : University Hospital Bonn — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

With a growing ageing population, there is an imminent demand to develop new therapeutic strategies to ameliorate disorders of the hematopoietic system. Our innate immune system can remember its previous encounters with inflammatory triggers. Epigenetic memories of previous inflammatory experiences throughout an individual's lifetime are imprinted in hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), a small pool of bone marrow progenitors that give rise to all our blood cells. Inflammation harms HSCs causing their functional decline and premature ageing. It also causes long-term differentiation bias, and a heightened basal inflammatory status, known as “inlfammageing”. The most striking characteristic of aged HSCs is their increased expression of platelet and megakaryocyte markers and their commitment towards platelet biogenesis, referred to as “Platelet-bias." Platelet bias has important consequences to human health. In our ERC starting grant project PLAT-IL-1 (714175), we discovered that platelets boost the inflammatory capacity of innate immune cells and are essential for the cytokine production of human monocytes. Our findings support that a dangerous combination of myeloid and platelet bias in inflammation-exposed HSCst results in a heightened innate immune activation. The injuries to HSCs are persistent and continue even after the clearance of the inflammatory insult, indicating that remnants of inflammatory events accrue and prolong damage to HSCs. Hence, if we could “erase" these harmful remnants, we could UNBIAS HSCs differentiation and prevent hyper-inflammation. In our ERC-funded project, we developed novel nanobodies that efficiently eliminate remnants of inflammation in vivo. In this PoC project, we will test the ability of nanobodies to erase memories from previous inflammatory events and prevent hyper-inflammation. This project will be a stepping stone to licensing our nanobodies to industrial partners.
Projet ERC : FARE_AUDIT (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : LIP - Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics — Pays : Portugal — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LIP
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The spread of disinformation is a serious problem that impacts social structure and threatens democracies worldwide. Citizens increasingly rely on (dis)information available online, either somewhat passively, through social media feeds, or actively, by using search engines and specific websites. In both scenarios, algorithms filter and select displayed information according to the users’ past preferences. There is a real risk that algorithms might reinforce the user’s beliefs and create (dis)information bubbles, by offering less divergent views, or even directing them to low-credibility content. For these reasons, serious efforts have been made to identify and remove “fake-news” websites and minimize the spread of disinformation on social media, but we have not witnessed equivalent attempts to understand and curtail the role of search engines. FARE_AUDIT addresses this imbalance and offers an innovative tool to audit search engines that can be broadly used. It will help to 1) better understand how browsing history influences search engine results, particularly the likelihood of being directed to disinformation, 2) create a system that democracy-promoting institutions and concerned citizens can use to identify new disinformation, in near real-time, and 3) breach information bubbles by simulating how search results would be different if users had a different online profile. By relying on web-crawlers, our tool is privacy-protecting and does not require any real user data. Moreover, the proposed system anticipates the announced shift from cookie-tracking to fingerprinting and takes advantage of the expected small time overlap between both systems to learn from both and broaden its scope. Overall, we expect this novel tool to have a meaningful social impact by increasing public awareness of the role of search engines on disinformation spread, and by equipping organizations with a tool to detect and monitor disinformation, especially in political contexts.
Projet ERC : Negev Wine Revival (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Haïfa — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Wine grapes (Vitis vinifera) are among the most sensitive crop to global warming. Elevated temperatures lessen the quality of the grapes and alter their distinctive traits. The threat is pushing winegrowers in Europe to look for new cultivars with greater resilience to climate change. Arid regions with longstanding winegrowing traditions are ideal for locating endemic grapevines that are resilient to high temperatures. With its storied history of sustainable dryland viticulture, the Negev desert in southern Israel is a prime location to hunt for novel heritage cultivars that over the centuries were bred for their ability to adapt to prevailing arid conditions. In our preceding ERC project, we examined agricultural and settlement intensification and collapse in the Negev during late Antiquity. We discovered via DNA testing that grape seeds excavated at an 8th C. CE Byzantine archaeological site in the Negev matched with heritage grape cultivars that still grow feral in the region. The current PoC aims to further these findings by formulating a multidisciplinary model for reviving bygone heritage cultivars. Concentrating on the Negev but intending for the broader application of our methodology, we will (1) plan for the efficient commercialisation of our genomic-based approach for matching bygone-but-hardy endemic cultivars with their nearest living relatives, (2) provide proof-of-concept by growing the revived grape cultivars in a Negev vineyard, (3) produce novel ‘Negev Wine’ from feral grape cultivars that will be the first heritage-based commercial wine in Israel that is also in accordance with the Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) platform of the EU, (4) compile ample documentation of the dynamic and initiate an IPR protection process while, (5) involving external stakeholders in the applied integration within the wine sector of our ‘from near extinction to market distinction’ methodology.
Projet ERC : BLOODSPEED (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université d'Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 75000.0 €

Tissue O2 delivery is essential for life and rate-limiting for activities. Its maintenance is paramount in medical conditions ranging from critical care to anaemia, and a common corrective intervention is blood transfusion, drawing an annual demand of >20 units/1000 people. Blood tests are routinely performed (2/capita/year in Europe) to measure surrogates of O2-carrying capacity, such as haemoglobin content, driving a global market worth €10B. However, current diagnostics cannot measure the speed of O2 release from red blood cells (RBCs), a parameter as important in determining tissue oxygenation as O2-carrying capacity and particularly labile in haematological disease and blood storage. To address this unmet need, we developed single-cell oxygen saturation imaging, a method for tracking O2 release from individual RBCs. We demonstrated how O2-unloading depends critically on the shape and metabolic state of RBCs, providing a gauge of the blood’s physiological quality. Notably, our method described slower O2 unloading in spherocytic anaemias and in banked blood units. To verify significance, we showed how impaired O2 release from stored RBCs reduces oxygenation and respiration in perfused human kidneys. End-users of our technology are blood-banks (quality control, recipient-donor matching, guiding improvements in materials and methods) and clinicians (novel haematological traits, transfusion, transplant medicine). However, further data are required to re-affirm the medical utility and market for our novel parameter. Teaming with engineers and industry, this project will design and assemble three benchtop prototypes of our device for proof-of-concept testing in a blood bank (UK’s NHSBT), intensive care (Great Ormond St Hospital), and haematological research (Peru). Positive experience will make a compelling case for measuring O2-handling. Our ambition is to produce a next-generation haematology analyser as a spin-out, or for acquisition by a major commercial partner.
Projet ERC : ILCE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : University Hospital Erlangen — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Chronic inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and spondyloarthropathies (SpA) represent a persistent healthcare challenge, requiring life-long management because of treatments with limited long-term efficacy. The key to a breakthrough may lie in the strategic engagement of Innate Lymphoid Cells (ILCs), whose potential in resolving inflammation and reprogramming tissue memory emerges from the recent ERC-funded research by Rauber et al. (2024). The study published in Nature Immunology elucidates the physiological function of ILCs to control inflammation. Building on this, we propose an innovative ILC engager (ILCE), aiming to harness natural pathways of resolution of inflammation and to offer a significant improvement over anti-cytokine therapies. Our approach bypasses generalized immunosuppression and thereby reduces the risk of infection by maintaining the body's acute inflammatory response. The development of an ILCE holds the promise to gain a new class of precise and efficacious therapeutics for chronic inflammatory diseases, revolutionizing patient outcomes by tailoring treatments to the nuanced pathophysiology of inflammation.
Projet ERC : SPHERO-NASH (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Hepapredict ab — Pays : Suède — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 50000.0 €

NASH is the progressive form of NAFLD that underlies the development of fibrosis, cirrhosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma. The global prevalence of NASH is estimated at 1 billion individuals. NASH is a major cause of death, now the major reason for liver transplantations and the disease is an important cause of hepatocellular cancer (HCC). Currently, there are no FDA-approved drug therapies available. Within the ERC project Hepaspher, a new liver model was developed in which human hepatocytes and non-parenchymal cells are grown in a 3D spheroid structure that phenotypically closely resembles human liver in vivo with respect to transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome for up to 35 days. This model has proven to be of valuable use for the development and treatment of liver diseases such as steatosis, cholestasis, hepatitis, insulin resistance, and fibrosis. In the SPHERO-NASH project, we focus on a more complex system whereby both inducers and mechanisms of NASH formation, drug-induced inhibition of NASH as well as studies of extracellular matrix (ECM) degradation including collagens and the role of ECM degradation control in the development and treatment of NASH can be studied. For this purpose HTS based screening in the SPHERO-NASH spheroid system will take place utilizing both siRNA target libraries and chemical inhibition libraries at HepaPredict AB with a proposed delivery of novel compounds/targets that can be further processed in drug developmental projects. We propose to commercialize the SPHERO-NASH model itself but also to commercialize targets and compounds found by siRNA and compound screening that regulate NASH formation and degradation. We aim to assess and demonstrate the commercial value to the pharmaceutical industry by building a strong knowledge transfer strategy. The SPHERO-NASH model thus has great fundamental and commercial potential in NASH drug discovery and development.
Projet ERC : Real-PCM-PIM (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Technion - Institut de technologie d'Israël — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Separation of processing and memory is the root cause of the main performance and energy bottlenecks in modern computers. In the PI's ERC Stg, we proposed to combine data processing and storage in the same cells, to develop a novel unit called the 'memristive memory processing unit' (mMPU). This unit was based on resistive RAM (RRAM), which is still not commercial in large capacity. A different memory technology, phase change memory (PCM), is commercially available in large capacity (for example, Intel's Optane has 1.5 TB memory), and can serve as an appropriate technology to form an mMPU with short time-to-market. In this PoC, we aim to experimentally demonstrate a working mMPU based on commercially-available PCM. This mMPU will enable fast and energy efficient computers that are cheaper than existing computers. This will impact different applications such as artificial intelligence, databases, and genomics. The mMPU-based computers will allow faster and cheaper execution of the aforementioned applications. In this proposal, we target the required technical and business steps required to develop such an mMPU and to commercialize it.
Projet ERC : SaferBirths (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
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 : 150000.0 €

We seek to develop and validate a sensorised surgical gloves. The sensors are based on a multifunctional nanocomposite which is nontoxic and can serve as ultrathin tactile sensors, integrated directly on the fingertips of surgical gloves. These sensorised gloves enable mechanical energy harvesting, force sensing and assessment of several other mechanical parameters from fingertips. Having completed laboratory validation, ex vivo testing and low risk investigations to establish the protocols and preclinical investigation into usability of the device, the current POC project will focus on completing preclinical and clinical studies.
Projet ERC : GRIP (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : University Medical Center Utrecht — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UMC
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

GRIP develops a personalised, 3D-printed regenerative bone implant as a treatment for hip instability (hip dysplasia) and its commercialisation strategy. Osteoarthritis (OA) of the hip is a painful and debilitating condition and hip dysplasia is one of the two main causes. The currently most common surgical methods to correct the dysplasia involve the re-alignment of the hip socket (osteotomy) or the insertion of a bone graft to enlarge the socket (shelf arthroplasty). While the osteotomy is invasive, the shelf arthroplasty requires donor tissue. In addition, both procedures only have limited success rates. GRIP implants overcome the current shortcomings of these methods and provide a novel personalized implant to treat hip dysplasia. GRIP will provide patients and surgeons with an easy to use, one-step and cost-effective regenerative device, therefore overcoming the significant drawbacks with current treatments for hip dysplasia. The GRIP implants will be precisely fabricated from a flexible bone-inducing biomaterial through a process both developed and established within the ERC-CoG “3D-JOINT” project. This will ensure a perfect fit, resulting in optimal integration and durable restoration of the hip socket, as well as obviating the need for complex and invasive osteotomy surgeries. GRIP implants will revolutionise the treatment of hip dysplasia as they provide a stable, long-term, and regenerative solution that will fully integrate with the host bone tissue. Moreover, the regenerative nature will also make this a potential treatment option for younger (paediatric) patients. As GRIP will transform the treatment of hip dysplasia and will improve long-term health and well-being of both human and veterinary patients the economic value and the route to the market for the GRIP technologies will be explored.
Projet ERC : Inhibicov (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Institut Weizmann — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : WIS
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The Covid-19 pandemic emphasized the urgent need for efficient broad-spectrum antiviral drugs against potential future coronaviruses (CoV) strains that may cause the next COVID pandemic. A critical stage during infection is the fusion of the viral envelope with the host-cell membrane, which depends on the conserved S2 domain of the viral Spike (S) protein. Hence, targeting the S2 domain is a promising approach to achieving pan-CoV inhibition. Since MERS- and SARS- S proteins bind to different cellsurface receptors through the rapidly diversifying S1 domain, we reasoned that compounds that inhibit both must target the S2 domain. We developed and performed a robust fluorescence-based high-throughput screen of 173,227 unique compounds and classified them based on their ability to inhibit infection of pseudoviruses bearing either MERS or SARS-2 S proteins at single-cell resolution. To our knowledge, this is the largest screen performed to date. This analysis identified several potent broad-spectrum small molecules that inhibit S protein mediated infection at sub-micromolar concentrations. Moreover, the compounds we discovered obey Lipinski's rule of five, indicating that they can potentially become drugs to prevent viral transmission. This project aims to develop two of the most promising broad-spectrum CoV small molecule inhibitors to create more clinically ready compounds with up to 100% inhibition activity that could be administered orally to reduce hospitalizations, prevent chronic effects, and reduce mortality. The technical work in the project is focused on lead optimization leading towards broad-spectrum antiviral drugs against future outbreaks of bat-borne viruses. The project also comprises pre-commercialization activities, where IP protection and commercialization planning are the core activities. Eventually, we will expect our developed compound(s) to boost the market for antiviral therapies for bat-borne viruses.