Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : TRANSFORM (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Social World and Its Diversity
Entité participante : Maastricht University — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UM
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1053700.75 €

The Trafficking Transformations Project will use an innovative, multidisciplinary, object-centred framework to investigate the physical and contextual changes that illicit criminogenic collectables undergo during the trafficking process in three transnational criminal markets: antiquities, rare wildlife, and fossils. It will explore the socio-economic effects of the trafficked objects on participants in international criminal networks. It will transform organised crime research by shifting the focus of trafficking research away from criminals and networks of criminals toward following the objects of desire. Prior approaches to trafficking research cast trafficking as an interface between organised crime (people moving the objects) and white-collar crime (affluent people receiving goods); objects were not considered social agents in these networks. Trafficking Transformations pushes the boundaries of mainstream criminology, proposing an innovative object-centred understanding of trafficking networks, and exploring the ultimate question: How do objects cause crimes? The project will use object biography, a multi-sited ethnography technique, to investigate the influences and transformations of trafficked criminogenic collectables in international illicit markets. Through data collection at multiple sites along trafficking pathways, the transformations of criminogenic collectables, the networks that they create, and the people they influence will form a narrative, a biography of trafficking. This will reveal the hidden lives of illicit commodities prior to their appearance as objects of conspicuous consumption in public markets, and holds the prospect of destabilising existing assumptions about the formulation, maintenance, and disruption of transnational criminal networks, transforming our understanding of organised crime.

Mots-clés : trafficking,transnational crime,organised crime,antiquities,wildlife,fossils,criminal networks
Projet ERC : VIBRA (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : Politecnico di Milano — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : POLIMI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1822500.0 €

The VIBRA project aims at developing an innovative microscope for real-time non-invasive imaging of cells and tissues, which promises to have a revolutionary impact on several fields of biology and medicine. Chemically specific vibrational signatures of molecules enable their direct structural characterization. Reliable and quantitative endogenous bio-markers can be established, e.g., to follow cell differentiation and to identify crucial properties of tissues (malignant vs benign phenotype of a tumour). In this way neoplasms can be located and their borders with normal tissue traced for surgery. Spontaneous Raman spectroscopy demonstrated this capability, but it is intrinsically too slow for imaging. Coherent Raman microscopy, on the other hand, can reach extremely high speed (up to the video rate) but at the expense of poor chemical selectivity, being limited to a single vibrational frequency. The ground-breaking goal of VIBRA is to combine the most detailed molecular information over the entire vibrational spectrum with the highest acquisition speed. The PI will develop a complete coherent Raman microscope for near-video-rate broadband vibrational imaging. This high risk/high gain goal will be achieved by the combination of four key developments: improved pulsed laser source; optimized non-linear interaction, enhancing the signal; increase in acquisition speed, thanks to innovative spectrometers; parallel on-board data processing. In the final application phase, the VIBRA project will validate the performances of the novel vibrational imaging system studying two important bio-medical problems: cancerous cell differentiation and detection of neuronal tumours. This will pave the way towards future “virtual histopathology”: intraoperative non-invasive evaluation of cancerous tissue. My vision is to allow researchers and doctors without a specific knowledge in lasers and optics to routinely visualize functional properties of cells and tissues in vivo.

Mots-clés : biomedical imaging,coherent raman spectroscopy,microscopy,femtosecond laser pulses,coherent anti stokes raman scattering,stimulated raman scattering
Projet ERC : WAVESCOPE (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Sapienza University of Rome — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 105000.0 €

The WAVESCOPE project is about exploiting a novel optical concept recently introduced by the PI in the domain of medical imaging. This concept deals with the frontier research topic in the photonics, i.e. the self-control of the spatial quality of optical beams in multimode nonlinear optical fibers. The WAVESCOPE technology is poised to enable a breakthrough in the clinical domain, providing for the first time ever the stable delivery of high power and strongly focused optical beams with multimode optical fibers into the demanding domain of intraoperative imaging. In the state-of-the-art multimode nonlinear optical devices, propagation in multimode fibers is hampered by randomization of light beams, leading to beam scrambling after short lengths of fiber. This makes the use of multimode fibers unviable for real-time imaging, because of the necessary lengthy pre- and post-processing of the optical signal. Our approach is to exploit the intensity dependent refractive index of fibers to recover the spatial beam quality of a multimode wave. In the project we shall develop a new multimode fiber based device for scanning 3D samples with micrometer resolution by using ultrashort high peak power optical pulses, whereby fiber nonlinearity provides an environmentally robust compensation of temporal and spatial dispersion, thus preventing information spreading in time domain, and beam quality loss in the spatial domain. WAVESCOPE technology has applications in many industry fields: here we will demonstrate the proof-of-principle generation of high-resolution optical images in optical microscopy/endoscopy, thereby resolving an uncovered need on the introduction of the intraoperative pathologic assessment in oncology through the in-situ optical biopsy.

Mots-clés : optical fibers,kerr effect,nonlinear optics,optical solitons,multiphoton imaging,nonlinear microscopy,intraoperative pathology assessment,marker free microscopy,real time surgical margin assessment
Projet ERC : WAVESCOPE (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Université de Limoges — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UNILIM
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 15000.0 €

The WAVESCOPE project is about exploiting a novel optical concept recently introduced by the PI in the domain of medical imaging. This concept deals with the frontier research topic in the photonics, i.e. the self-control of the spatial quality of optical beams in multimode nonlinear optical fibers. The WAVESCOPE technology is poised to enable a breakthrough in the clinical domain, providing for the first time ever the stable delivery of high power and strongly focused optical beams with multimode optical fibers into the demanding domain of intraoperative imaging. In the state-of-the-art multimode nonlinear optical devices, propagation in multimode fibers is hampered by randomization of light beams, leading to beam scrambling after short lengths of fiber. This makes the use of multimode fibers unviable for real-time imaging, because of the necessary lengthy pre- and post-processing of the optical signal. Our approach is to exploit the intensity dependent refractive index of fibers to recover the spatial beam quality of a multimode wave. In the project we shall develop a new multimode fiber based device for scanning 3D samples with micrometer resolution by using ultrashort high peak power optical pulses, whereby fiber nonlinearity provides an environmentally robust compensation of temporal and spatial dispersion, thus preventing information spreading in time domain, and beam quality loss in the spatial domain. WAVESCOPE technology has applications in many industry fields: here we will demonstrate the proof-of-principle generation of high-resolution optical images in optical microscopy/endoscopy, thereby resolving an uncovered need on the introduction of the intraoperative pathologic assessment in oncology through the in-situ optical biopsy.

Mots-clés : optical fibers,kerr effect,nonlinear optics,optical solitons,multiphoton imaging,nonlinear microscopy,intraoperative pathology assessment,marker free microscopy,real time surgical margin assessment
Projet ERC : SegregActin (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Cellular, Developmental and Regenerative Biology
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 : 1500000.0 €

The ability of cells to use the actin cytoskeleton for a diversity of cellular processes is due to the fact that actin filaments, although assembled from identical subunits, are organized in a wide variety of structures of appropriate geometrical, dynamical and rheological properties. Key players in this regulation are specific sets of actin binding proteins (ABPs) interacting with each actin networks, to modulate spatially and temporally their properties. With this project, I want to understand 1/ how cells can generate the formation of actin structures of appropriate ABP composition from a common pool of cytoplasmic components and 2/ the relationship between the ABP composition of an actin network, its geometrical and dynamical properties, and its response to mechanical deformations. I will hypothesize that the generation of an actin network of appropriate ABP composition can be explained with an original model, taking into account the facts that 1/ actin filaments in cells are not all structurally identical, but adopt specific conformations that are favored and stabilized by certain families of ABPs; and 2/ the interaction of ABPs with actin depends of the geometrical organization of the filaments. Because this project imposes to study protein-protein interactions in the presence of multiple partners, I propose to develop an unprecedented strategy combining 1/ "bottom-up" reconstitutions, where limited sets of ABPs are added one-by-one in the system to understand their combined activities with actin; and 2/ "top-down" reconstitutions with protein extracts prepared from a genetically-tractable organism (the yeast S. cerevisiae), where proteins can be removed one-by-one, in order to study actin network properties in near-physiological conditions. This project will shed a new light on how cells organize their interior, and will represent a unique opportunity to understand how modifications in the expression of ABPs are associated with actin network defects.

Mots-clés : cytoskeleton,actin networks,cellular organization,actin binding protein segregation,reconstituted systems,single molecule imaging,mechanotransduction,lipid membranes
Projet ERC : MTrix (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Hebrew University of Jerusalem — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HUJI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499875.0 €

The ability to direct drug delivery to specific tissues is a central challenge in treating diseases as it determines the balance between drug selectivity and toxicity. Clinical drug failures, commonly due to safety issues or poor efficacy, are extremely costly to the pharmaceutical industry. In light of this, there is a global effort to develop Targeted Drug Delivery Systems (DDS) and Nanomedicine-based drugs to increase the therapeutic efficacy of a drug while substantially reducing its off-target exposure. In oncology, this issue is critical since chemotherapies have poor selectivity, thus causing severe side effects due to undesired systemic exposure. However, the enormous heterogeneity and dynamic nature of tumors makes it extremely challenging to identify universal target molecules. In this ERC I introduce a novel concept according to which the specificity of DDS can be dramatically enhanced by tuning the physical parameters of DDS based on mechanical cues of target and non-target cells. In many cancers, it is well-established that the flexibility and deformability of cells are correlated with their metastatic potential. This leads to our hypothesis that the enhanced deformability of cancer cells allows them to engulf and uptake particles whose internalization requires massive shape change, unlike the stiffer and normal cells. The rationale of the proposed study is that by considering physical parameters of cells, the mechanical properties of DDS can be tuned to achieve selective uptake. We thus propose to develop tools for rational design of DDS for personalized nanomedicine that will use simple tests performed on a patient’s own cells. This is the basis of our visionary Mechanical Targeting (MT) scheme, a crosstalk between experimental and computational models, for drug specificity. Accordingly, this ERC is expected to yield breakthroughs, both conceptual and technical.

Mots-clés : nanoparticles,drug delivery,targeted drug delivery,endocytosis,cancer,nanomedicine
Projet ERC : DEVMEM (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : University of London — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : U. London
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999520.0 €

The ability to form and store memories allows organisms to learn from the past and imagine the future: it is a crucial mechanism underlying flexible and adaptive behaviour. The aim of this proposal is to identify the circuit mechanisms underlying our ability to learn and remember, by tracking the ontogenesis of memory processing. Importantly, we are not born with a fully functioning memory system: generally, adults cannot recollect any events from before their third birthday (‘infantile amnesia’). There are several accounts as to the source of this mnemonic deficit, each placing emphasis on impairments of specific processes (encoding, consolidation, retrieval). However, a general weakness in the study of memory ontogeny is the lack of neural data describing the activity of memory-related circuits during development. To directly address this knowledge gap, we propose to study the ontogeny of brain-wide hippocampus-centred memory networks in the rat. We will study to which extent memory expression relies on spatial signalling, delineate the role of sleep in memory consolidation, determine how hippocampal planning-related neuronal activity influences memory processing, understand whether the rapid forgetting observed in development is due to interference, and explore interactions between the hippocampus, pre-frontal and striatal circuits in orchestrating memory emergence. We are best placed to deliver this ambitious experimental plan due to our extensive experience of in vivo recording in developing rats which we will couple with the application of recently emerged technologies (2-photon imaging, high density electrophysiology, chemogenetic manipulation of neural activity). As our studies of the development of hippocampal spatial representations have delivered powerful insights into their adult function, we expect the work outlined here to critically advance our understanding not only of development, but also of healthy memory processing in adulthood.

Mots-clés : hippocampus,navigation,learning,memory,development
Projet ERC : PhotoPHARMA (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : University of Zurich — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UZH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

The ability to functionalise a biologically active protein with a range of different cargo molecules is crucial to accessing new tools for use in fundamental science and clinical medicine. For instance, antibody-conjugates that graft reporter molecules including fluorescent tags or radioactive metal ion chelates play vital roles in diagnostic imaging with optical and nuclear medicine techniques like positron emission tomography (PET). State-of-the-art advances in chemotherapy also take advantage of the biophysical properties of antibodies in the design of highly potent antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) that facilitate specific delivery and uptake of cytotoxic or radiotoxic payloads to disease lesions. Surprisingly, almost all existing methods to produce protein-conjugates rely on thermally-mediated coupling chemistries. In PhotoPHARMA, the goal is to break away from the convention of using heat to drive protein functionalisation by designing new photochemical reagents that are activated by the absorption of light. Light-induced activation has the potential to solve many of the practical issues encountered in the synthesis of radiolabelled antibodies and other protein-conjugates. The work encompasses 4 main Objectives: Objective 1. Explore the biochemical scope of light-induced reactions for bimolecular protein-ligation Objective 2. Synthesis, characterisation and biological studies of photo(radio)labelled antibodies for use in diagnostic imaging and therapy Objective 3. Develop automated technologies for photoradiochemical synthesis of 89Zr-antibodies Objective 4. Establish the GLP-synthesis and Chemistry, Manufacturing and Controls (CMC) for future translation of photoradiolabelled 89Zr-antibodies to the clinic The long-term goals are to facilitate the synthesis and clinical translation of protein-drug conjugates by introducing a radical new technology based on the fast, reliable and automated approach of using light-induced chemistry.

Mots-clés : protein conjugation,photochemistry,radiochemistry,pet imaging,fluorophores,antibodies
Projet ERC : OLECAT (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ETH Zurich
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2498635.0 €

The ability toThe ability to readily access small-molecule building blocks at will has important consequences for the discovery and development of novel medicines and materials. It is particularly beneficial when the chemical methods are convenient while at the same time economically and environmentally tenable and sustainable. We are especially interested in catalytic processes that are easily executed and utilize readily available starting materials to produce optically active products with high regio, chemo, diastereo, and enantioselectivity. The proposal aims to discover, develop, and study a collection of enantioselective olefin functionalization reactions that provide access to useful building blocks, such as amines, azides, hydrazines, nitriles, alcohols, involving acyclic, cyclic and bicyclic structures. The catalyst will be derived from earth abundant metals, such as Fe, Mn, and Co and incorporate novel chiral ligands. The study includes the design and preparation of two structural classes of novel, chiral boric acids that are expected to serve as catalyst for the enantioselective functionalization of unsaturated carboxylic acids and boronic acids. The methods are expected to substantially impact the development of novel strategies for complex molecule synthesis. In this regard, we propose to use the catalysts form this study to convert dienes and trienes into polyols with characteristic stereochemical and oxidation patterns found in bioactive agents, including pharma- and nutraceuticals (carnitine). Such advances enable new approaches that go beyond the well-established methods such as aldol/allylation for the preparation of stereochemically complex fragments. Catalysts will also be developed that convert acyclic olefinic alcohols and amines into optically active, saturated furans, pyrans, pyrrolidines, and piperidines. The implementation of the various catalytic methods in complex settings enables efficient, convergent routes to bioactive agents.

Mots-clés : alkenes,enantioselective,catalysis
Projet ERC : KineTic (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Leiden University — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

The activation of The activation of cytotoxic T-cells (CTLs) marks the key step in the adaptive immune response against cancer and viral infections. Vaccines that activate the CTL-response against tumours are currently hotly pursued, with those targeting tumour-specific mutations now reaching the clinic. However, the capacity of these vaccines to actually activate CTLs is low and rational design improvements are needed to broaden their application. For this, better in vivo knowledge on the processes leading to CTL-activation is needed. CTLs are activated by dendritic cells. These cells take up the vaccine, and process it to 8-10-mer peptides for presentation to CTLs on MHC-I complexes. A process called cross-presentation. In this proposal, I aim to quantify key unknowns of this pathway, relating to its kinetics and the subcellular route a vaccine takes to reach the MHC-loading site. I will: a) Quantify the kinetics of peptide-MHC appearance, persistence and disappearance, in vivo using vaccines carrying bioorthogonal protecting/blocking groups that allow me to chemically activate, and stop, the recognition by CTLs in time. b) I will also study the sub-cellular route(s) the vaccine antigens take in vivo, by developing a second family deprotection and blocking reagents that are targeted to specific organelles. This localised vaccine activation (or de-activation) will allow me to study the different proposed subcellular routes of the antigen in isolation and assess the importance of the many proposed subcellular routes in vivo to overall cross-presentation success. The kinetic and routing information obtained from this new set of reagents, will allow me to shed light on some of the key unknowns relating to cross-presentation in vivo, and assess their importance to the success of CTL-activation. By using vaccine-models closely related to existing cancer vaccines, these data will in turn serve to support the rational design of better anti-tumour vaccines.

Mots-clés : bioorthogonal chemistry,bioorthogonal deprotection chemistry,antigen cross presentation,synthetic long peptide vaccination,inverse electron demand diels alder,click to release