Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : VIA-EVICARE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, 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 €

The fundamental objective of the VIA-EVICARE ERC Proof of Concept project is to ascertain the technical and commercial feasibility of a ground-breaking technology to revolutionize the delivery of therapeutics via extracellular vesicles (EVs). EVs are naturally occurring nanosized vesicles that facilitate the transfer of biological cargo between cells and offer numerous benefits over conventional drug delivery systems. By leveraging a novel, virus-inspired mechanism, we aim for a modular design that combines a significant improvement of targeting, loading, and release of therapeutics that overcomes the limitations of existing strategies. By designing and synthesizing self-assembling viral proteins and recruiting EV biogenesis components, we aim to: I. Validating the efficiency and specificity of EV-therapeutic loading, EV-generation, and EV uptake mechanisms upon introduction of different self-assembling proteins. II. Optimizing the modular design for large-scale production, ensuring reproducibility and cost-effectiveness and validate our innovative VIA-EVICARE loading strategy by assessing biodistribution and functional delivery in vivo. III. Conduct a comprehensive intellectual property (IP) landscape analysis to establish freedom-to-operate (FTO) and ensure that our technology can be commercialized without infringing on existing patents. IV. Develop a robust and detailed business plan to effectively guide the commercialization of our loading technology, thus bringing a transformative solution to treating various diseases.
Projet ERC : MULTI-C (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Tel Aviv — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TAU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Blood cancers remain challenging to diagnose and monitor due to the standard of care requirement for bone marrow biopsies and limitations in current biomarker detection technologies. DNA modifications, specifically 5-methylcytosine (5mC) and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC)—are powerful epigenetic regulators in blood cancer development, providing valuable diagnostic and prognostic information. Despite their clinical importance, current technologies fail to simultaneously detect both 5mC and 5hmC with precision and efficiency, creating a significant barrier to clinical implementation of these epigenetic marks. This proposal introduces an innovative microarray platform that overcomes these limitations by enabling simultaneous profiling of both 5mC and 5hmC modifications from blood samples within a single, cost-effective assay. Unlike current methods that struggle with modification differentiation, sample degradation, and complex workflows, our technology offers a streamlined approach that preserves sample integrity while delivering superior diagnostic accuracy. Our innovation lies in the ability to distinguish different cytosine modifications (MULTI-C), which provides significantly enhanced diagnostic accuracy compared to single-marker approaches. The platform's remarkable sensitivity allows detection from minimal DNA inputs, making it ideally suited for minimally-invasive liquid biopsy applications—a critical advancement for patient monitoring and precision medicine in hematological malignancies. This research has the potential to transform how blood cancers are diagnosed, monitored, and treated by addressing a fundamental technological gap in epigenetic profiling and reducing the need for bone marrow biopsies.
Projet ERC : GREENZYME (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Gérone — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Catalysts are able to reduce activation barriers of reactions making them possible at lower pressure an temperatures. Enzymes are the most efficient, specific, and selective catalysts known. Green chemistry has emerged as a new area focusing on use of environmentally friendly, non-hazardous and efficient solvents and catalysts in the synthesis of new products. Enzymes are non-toxic, and capable of operating under mild biological conditions, which makes them green catalysts offering an attractive alternative to traditional catalysis. However, their application in industry is rather limited as most industrial processes lack a natural enzyme. The solution is the routine design of enzymes, but this task has not yet been achieved due to several limitations, such as the high complexity of enzyme catalysis, the lack of accurate computational approaches for designing and estimating the catalytic potential of the new variants, and the inability to identify potential mutation sites far away from the active site of the enzyme. GREENZYME provides a new protocol able to capture this high complexity and design new enzymes capable of predicting active site and distal mutations, thus achieving high levels of activity (as it would occur in nature). This is achieved by integrating current Shortest Path Map-Ancestral Sequence Reconstruction (SPM-ASR)-based computational protocol developed in previous projects such as the ERC-StG NetMoDEzyme with deep learning techniques. Thanks to a well-thought-out exploitation and communication strategy, will make possible the premise of routine enzyme design. This will have a large-scale socio-economic impact, as it will reduce the production costs of many drugs and will allow industries to use environmentally friendly alternatives in line with new European policies.
Projet ERC : TA2TRSQ (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Organisms display various mechanisms to compensate for the deleterious effects of harmful mutations. One such mechanism is transcriptional adaptation (TA), a recently identified mode of gene regulation whereby mutant mRNA decay triggers the transcriptional modulation of so-called adapting genes, independently of protein loss (Rossi et al., Nature 2015; El-Brolosy et al., Nature 2019). In some cases, TA can lead to functional compensation by upregulating genes that are functionally redundant with the mutated gene. In our funded project, Transcriptional Adaptation and Genetic Compensation (TAaGC), we are investigating the mechanisms underlying TA and its relevance to human health and disease. We have now observed TA in human cells and found that splice-switching antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) can be used as tools to induce TA (Falcucci et al., Nature 2025). By causing the skipping of out-of-frame exons, these ASOs disrupt the reading frame, thereby triggering mutant mRNA decay and the upregulation of functional paralogs. Using this approach, we have induced the upregulation of functional paralogs for both the DMD and LMNA genes, mutations in which cause Duchenne muscular dystrophy and laminopathies, respectively. ASOs have been approved by regulatory agencies, including the FDA, for the treatment of multiple diseases, altogether suggesting that splice-switching ASOs constitute a viable therapeutic approach to induce functional compensation via TA. In this PoC project, we first aim to further optimize the sequence of TA-inducing ASOs for DMD and LMNA in human and mouse cells in culture. The optimized human ASOs will then be fully investigated in relevant human cells in regards to their effect on the transcriptome and proteome; the optimized mouse ASOs will be tested in wild-type and mutant mice. Together, these studies will identify lead ASO candidates ready for further preclinical and clinical development in the treatment of DMD and laminopathies.
Projet ERC : Histtext (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Aix-Marseille Université — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : amU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

HistText is a groundbreaking application developed to address the complex challenges of large-scale data mining in textual corpora, with a particular focus on historical documents. Created in the context of the ERC-funded ENP-China project, which aims to study the evolution of Chinese elites from the 19th century to 1949, HistText is the result of a synergistic collaboration between historians and computer scientists exploring machine learning applications for extensive text archives. Designed to manage databases containing billions of words across millions of multilingual documents, HistText offers a robust and versatile platform that streamlines the process of extracting and visualizing valuable insights. The application features a user-friendly interface, advanced text analysis techniques, and powerful data visualization capabilities. It provides a simplified approach for novice users to conduct complex data queries and analyses, while also offering a comprehensive R-library for more expert users. The main challenge that the proof of concept aims to tackle is to make HistText a fully packageable and transferable tool that can cater to the specialized needs of scholars and institutions holding vast digital repositories. With its focus on advanced text analysis and user accessibility, HistText stands as an invaluable resource not only for academics in the digital humanities but also for students and the general public. In terms of broader applications, HistText has the potential to be integrated into a wide range of institutions (libraries, digital content providers, etc.). The platform is exceptionally well-suited for analyzing a wide range of text genres, including newspapers, periodicals, directories, and diaries, among others. By offering a scalable, user-friendly, and methodologically rigorous tool, HistText aims to revolutionize how we approach large-scale textual analysis, providing a new pathway for understanding historical documents.
Projet ERC : OatLive (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université Radboud de Nimègue — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Current clinically approved drug delivery systems, such as liposome, PEGylated liposome, and polymeric micelle, predominantly rely on passive accumulation within tumor tissues by diffusion through the defective tumor vessels during circulation. The targeting efficacy toward cancer cells is very limited due to their inadequate interaction with cancer cells. The attachment of targeting ligands to nanocarriers has demonstrated its effectiveness in enhancing binding affinity and, consequently, facilitating cellular uptake via receptor-mediated endocytosis. However, the conventional methods employed for ligand attachment suffer from harsh conditions, low efficiency, and limited control over ligand orientation. These drawbacks compromise the targeting performance and are believed to result in the current absence of a targeted drug delivery system on the market. In this project, we propose a simple, efficient, and mild attachment method to spontaneously activate on demand nanocarriers. This innovative approach has the potential to have a multi- level effect, first to revolutionize various fields, including drug delivery, diagnostics, and nanotechnology, by providing advanced tools for targeted therapies and diagnostics. Secondly, by developing novel methodologies that can be applied to existing technologies to enhance uptake, localization, and efficacy while minimizing systemic toxicity thus potentially shifting the health- economic balance for some treatments which were previously inaccessible.
Projet ERC : DRVis (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 €

Real-life applications of computer vision often require high-quality visual sensors. With current technology, such sensors are expensive. Empirical evidence from our ERC-funded research of biological vision suggests that eye motion enhances recognition capabilities beyond what could be expected if the eye was functioning as a static camera. Motivated by these findings, here we aim to perform the major computer vision tasks required for many real-life applications, including segmentation, classification and identification, with low-resolution cameras. The idea is to use a series of low-resolution frames from a moving camera, rather than using a single high-resolution image. This novel algorithm, termed here DRVis, can be implemented in software or hardware. Unlike existing solutions that use multiple frames to reconstruct a high resolution image from low resolution ones, DRVis does not need to learn all the particularities needed for reconstruction; instead, it focuses on extracting the necessary features per the given task. The goals of the PoC project are to scale up and diversify our current software system, implement the system in hardware and demonstrate its performance in field conditions and develop the IPR strategy and explore the commercialization potential of our solution. We expect it will be applicable to a wide spectrum of image processing tasks in settings where sensor quality is low but multiple time samples are available including smart agriculture, drone navigation and visual aid devices.
Projet ERC : LEO (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Institut de micro-électronique et composants — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : IMEC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

This ERC Proof of Concept (PoC) project aims to demonstrate a low-loss fibre-to-chip coupler, a critical component for the PI’s ERC project QAMP (101042414). While QAMP focuses on achieving unity electro-optical transduction to convert superconducting qubits to optical qubits, the realized product requires an efficient fibre-to-chip coupler to extract the optical qubits. Our patented innovation introduces a fibre-to-chip coupler with unprecedented low losses of 0.015 dB (0.35%), which is an order-of-magnitude lower than current state-of-the-art solutions. Achieving such low-loss coupling is vital for five out of the six major quantum computer contenders (superconducting, optical, neutral atom, ionic and colour centre qubits). This development is particularly crucial for the field of optical quantum computing, valued at over a billion dollars, which depends on efficient fibre-to-chip couplers to realize their basic computational functionality. The successful implementation of this technology would enable the other qubit contenders to entangle and connect individual quantum processing units via a fibre network, thus addressing the current bottleneck in quantum information processing that requires millions of qubits working in unison.
Projet ERC : ZONESHED (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, 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 €

Metabolic Dysfunction-Associated Steatotic Liver Disease (MASLD) is emerging as the leading chronic liver disease worldwide. Identifying MASLD patients that are at higher risk of rapid progression is an outstanding challenge, but it would enable focusing resources on the patients with high risk while saving un-necessary costly liver function tests and biopsies for the majority of patients. MASLD progression is influenced by the liver's spatial heterogeneity, where variable gene expression along the porto-central axes of its lobules leads to the disease starting in pericentral hepatocytes and spreading portally, with greater portal involvement indicating more advanced stages. As hepatocytes die, they shed their content into the blood stream, enabling capturing a snapshot of liver turnover patterns by transcriptomically profiling cell free RNA (cfRNA). During my ERC-COG, I resolved the genome wide zonation patterns of all hepatocyte genes, allowing to determine the zone of damage and stratify patients for early follow-up and treatment. In this PoC, I will validate a targeted transcriptomic test of cfRNA for MASLD diagnosing, consisting of zonated hepatocyte biomarkers and an associated machine learning (ML) algorithm. The anticipated outcome is a significant improvement in MASLD diagnosis, reducing healthcare costs, and improving patient outcomes by tailoring interventions based on precise molecular insights. To pave the way for commercialization of our cfRNA droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) kit and associated zonal damage ML classifier, I will explore the liver disease diagnosis market and value chain, identify and engage with relevant industry players and set up a commercialization plan with the aim of positioning our innovation as the new standard for diagnosing and managing MASLD patients.
Projet ERC : FusionASO (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, 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 €

There is an immense interest in RNA therapeutics for a wide variety of health conditions. Neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs), which mostly have no available treatments or cures, affect millions of children and adults across Europe, and are estimated to account for as much as 1-3% of the total EU healthcare expenditure. Wiedemann-Steiner Syndrome (WSS) is an NDD that currently has no available treatment and is not amenable to traditional gene therapy approaches. Antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) are a clinically proven way to modulate gene expression, in particularly in the central nervous system. ASOs are almost exclusively used for reduction of gene expression or altering RNA splicing, but these are relevant only in a subset of conditions. Many neurological diseases are caused by haploinsufficiency, in which the patient has one wild-type copy of the gene, but it is not sufficient for normal cellular function. ASO-based approaches for up-regulating haploinsufficient gene expression are sought in many cases, but existing methods, such as those focused on blocking microRNA target sites are often of limited efficacy. In our ERC project, we made an intriguing observation that blocking specific regulatory motifs in the last exon of the CHASERR long noncoding RNAs leads to up-regulation of the downstream CHD2 gene through the formation of a fusion transcript between the two genes. We found that this approach can be translated for the up-regulation of CHD2 in vivo and alleviate disease-relevant phenotypes. In this PoC, we aim to extend this novel concept to WSS and explore and demonstrate the technical viability and commercial potential of targeting the ATP5MG pre-mRNA with specific ASOs to induce fusion formation with KMT2A (MLL1), thereby developing a potential new treatment for WSS. This project will not only advance the scientific understanding and therapeutic potential of this technology but also assess its market readiness and commercial feasibility.
Projet ERC : AnLeadOp (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HGF
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The bacterial sliding clamp (DnaN) is an innovative target for the development of novel antibiotics, which are urgently needed to overcome the alarming antimicrobial resistance crisis. In the previous ERC starting grant (NovAnI), we discovered a novel DnaN inhibitor (WAM-N17) with promising broad-spectrum antibacterial activity including multidrug-resistant (MDR) pathogens. In this PoC project, we will optimize the antibacterial potency and spectrum and characterize the in vivo pharmacokinetic (PK) and pharmacodynamic (PD) properties of the WAM-N17 class so as to develop preclinical lead candidates for the treatment of bacterial infections, especially those caused by MDR germs. To achieve this goal, we will pursue three main activities. (i) Design and synthesis of 25–30 compounds (in two rounds) with modifications focusing on improving the anti-Gram-negative activity as well as target identification through chemical probes to further validate DnaN and identify other potential targets in bacteria. (ii) Evaluation of antibacterial activity, target binding/inhibition, and in vitro ADME-T (absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, toxicity) characterization for all new compounds. The frontrunners will be profiled for antibacterial activity against an extended panel of Gram-negative and MDR clinical isolates and subjected to mode of action (MoA) and target-identification studies. The most promising ten compounds will be submitted for in vivo PK studies and the best two lead candidates will be tested in a proof-of-concept in vivo efficacy study using relevant infection mouse models. (iii) Ultimately, we will file a patent to secure our intellectual property rights and continue to move this class of compounds forward into preclinical and then clinical studies in collaboration with a pharmaceutical industry partner. The knowledge that will be gained from this PoC project is essential to develop an urgently needed new antibiotic with an unprecedented mode of action.
Projet ERC : PTMActKit (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 €

Ubiquitination is a post-translational modification (PTM) that is critical for numerous biological processes, including cell cycle, autoimmunity, immune responses, and cancer. This has instigated vast interest in targeting the ubiquitin machinery, and in elucidating ubiquitin-dependent events in pathologies. However, a key constraint is the lack of high-throughput methodologies for monitoring ubiquitination in clinical samples. Current tools mostly provide a qualitative sense of ubiquitin substrates and are limited by the need for unique expertise and large amounts of biological material. To address this gap, we have established a PTM-profiling tool that utilizes enzymatic activity in biological samples (e.g. liquid biopsies), enabling readouts of several PTMs, across thousands of proteins, for multiple samples simultaneously. We will employ our platform technology to the discovery and development of ubiquitin-related diagnostics and therapeutic agents in the field of autoimmunity.