Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : SOCDEBT (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université de Heidelberg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1485917.0 €

The financialization of households in the 21st century has made credit and debt central to economic disparity, reshaping financial burdens and opportunities. Debt shackles the poor, limiting mobility, yet also offers leverage for the wealthy, enabling further investment, accumulation, and opportunity. This paradox of debt lies at the heart of SOCDEBT, which is built around four key goals: (1) SOCDEBT will examine debt stratification across 35 countries over three decades, identifying the social groups most likely to be indebted, the types of debt carried, and variations across countries and time; (2) the project will explore debt accumulation, particularly in response to (adverse) life events, and how this process varies across social groups and national contexts; (3) it will investigate debt practices and the factors influencing individuals' decisions to take on debt, strategies for repayment, and the role of social influences, such as peers; and finally (4) SOCDEBT will explore the moral economy of debt, examining how different social groups view debt and credit across countries, examining cultural and moral dimensions and how evaluations vary between working and middle classes. SOCDEBT transitions from investigating micro-level variations in household debt stratification to exploring meso-level debt practices and moral evaluations. This comprehensive approach will address critical gaps in understanding how debt stratification and accumulation vary across societal settings. By combining innovative statistical methods with multiple nationally representative household surveys for up to 35 countries across all continents and over time, along with new survey-experimental data and focus groups in five European countries, SOCDEBT will challenge and reshape our understanding of contemporary economic inequality dynamics around the world. Lastly, it will establish a new subfield of sociological inquiry: the Sociology of Comparative Debt Stratification

Mots-clés : social stratification,economic sociology,debt and credit,moral economy
Projet ERC : SOLAR (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Institut Karolinska — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499993.0 €

Social learning – learning from the behaviors of others – is key for our success as a species. Ideas and behaviors are transmitted between individuals and across generations via social learning, which gives rise to the evolution of human cultures. Social learning might also fuel modern threats, such as the growing social contagion of misinformation in social networks. Despite the crucial role of social learning across a myriad of human behaviors, surprisingly little is known about the (i) psychological, neural and computational mechanisms of social learning, and (ii) how these mechanisms create societal-level phenomena. The SOLAR project takes on the challenge of developing a new theoretical framework that addresses these issues. The framework will be formalized in novel computational models. The same coherent set of models will be tested on (i) the level of the brain using brain-imaging, (ii) the level of individual behavior, and (iii) the level of the population, using multi-agent simulation and analysis of real-world interaction in social networks. SOLAR involves three programs that address three fundamental, but as-of-yet unanswered questions about human social learning: (1) What are the mechanisms that produce social learning? (2) Does social learning drive social contagion? (3) How does social learning promote cultural evolution? In contrast to previous accounts, I predict that these seemingly disparate questions can be unified and understood by a coherent set of simpler social reinforcement learning mechanisms. I will test this hypothesis with a unique multi-method approach that bridges the “nano-level” of the brain, via the micro-level of human behavior, to the macro-level of the social group. SOLAR will shed new light on both fundamental scientific questions about the nature of human social learning, and on pressing social issues, such as how to explain and reduce collective risks due to social contagion (e.g., spreading of misinformation).

Mots-clés : social learning,cultural evolution,social neuroscience,social contagion,reinforcement learning,computational modeling,cognitive neuroscience
Projet ERC : BrainLoops (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Institut Karolinska — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499521.0 €

Disruption of energy homeostasis can lead to obesity, a major health issue worldwide. Therapeutic efforts to reduce adiposity are nullified by metabolic adaptations. The mechanisms underlying these phenomena are unclear, precluding efficient intervention. Although it is well established that important hormonal factors control adiposity, it is less appreciated that fat (white adipose tissue, WAT) is innervated by sympathetic and sensory fibres forming, with discrete brain nuclei, loop circuits. These circuits are well-positioned for enabling WAT-brain bidirectional, non-hormonal communication, yet they remained uncharacterized. This project will uncover the brain circuits processing sensory-sympathetic homeostatic control of body weight. Using labelling tracing strategies of the WAT, I will identify the brain areas containing loop neurons. I will interrogate their role in regulating body weight and processing WAT-derived inputs, using cutting-edge and complementary single-cell imaging and transcriptomic analysis. Complementarily, I will functionally manipulate, using opto- and chemo-genetics tools, the activity of loop neurons, and their brain→WAT outputs, in lean mice, mimicking activity changes in obesity, and assess system-wide effects on behavior, metabolism, and body weight. My expertise in both central and peripheral systems gives me a unique perspective to address these fundamental questions. Uncovering the role of non-hormonal WAT-body communication in the regulation of energy homeostasis will revolutionise our understanding of weight regulation in health and disease. This project will identify new molecular targets to develop better therapeutic strategies for obesity while also creating a platform for synergy between brain circuits and body organs, facilitating a host of future advances and new research directions.

Mots-clés : brain,fat,organs,neurons,loop,obesity,metabolic disorders,axis,interoception
Projet ERC : Precision Lethality (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Institut Karolinska — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1497981.0 €

Tumors are heterogeneous in nature due to genetic instabilitTumors are heterogeneous in nature due to genetic instability, ongoing selection, and variable microenvironments with local adaptation. Many tumors thus necessitate combinatorial drug treatments to reach all cells. This is true also for neuroblastoma, the most common extracranial solid pediatric tumor. Despite the well-known importance of clonal heterogeneity, most in vitro drug combination strategies, including commonly used synergistic interaction, do not quantify subclonal drug response. Here recently developed cell barcoding strategies will be used to monitor survival of thousands of individual subclones in neuroblastoma organoids, under different drug perturbations. This lineage tracing strategy allows identification of cell populations that survive a specific drug, and to find other drugs that specifically target those cell populations. I call this strategy “Precision Lethality”.  In this research program two different precision lethality methodologies will be developed, one where cell barcoding is used to identify drug combinations with low cross-resistance, and one that uses the possibility to express the barcode so it can be captured by single cell RNA sequencing. This allows assessing the transcriptional state before drug perturbation of cells that are known to be either drug resistant or drug sensitive. Combined with publicly available drug sensitivity data repositories, this will be used to construct a deep learning model to predict drug sensitivities of individual cells.  Successful completion of this multi-disciplinary research program will identify and verify new drugs to complement standard of care consolidation therapy for neuroblastoma. I also envision that these studies will showcase to the broader cancer research community how cell barcoding can be used as a drug combination strategy to overcome clonal heterogeneity, which would increase the chances of finding curative cancer treatments.

Mots-clés : drug response,drug synergy,drug response prediction,deep learning,single cell sequencing,cell barcoding,expressed cellular barcodes,precision lethality,microwells,lineage tracing,rare cell survival
Projet ERC : SpaRC (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Institut Karolinska — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

The human genome contains several thousand genes that play a key role in the development of the brain’s connectome, a precise assembly of neural connections with billions of neurons and trillions of synapses. How is genomic information translated into synapse-specific connectivity underlying behavior and cognition? Answering this fundamental question will provide important insights about the principles underlying nervous system development and is relevant for neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism. However, current approaches to measure neuronal connectivity have intrinsic limitations that prevent combined analysis of connected neurons, and their gene expression profiles at a scale that matches the complexity of the mammalian nervous system. Here I propose to develop a novel approach for massively parallel neural circuit tracing with barcoded rabies virus and 3D intact-tissue RNA-sequencing. This will permit a comprehensive understanding about neural network architecture via the large-scale measurement of molecular, cellular, and circuit-level mechanisms in the mouse brain. Compared to current efforts that require vast scientific resources to map synaptic connectivity among a few cells or small tissue volumes, my approach will enable routine measurements of connections among thousands of single neurons with molecular detail. Based on my expertise in in vivo barcoding I will conduct a longitudinal study to reveal the wiring rules underlying the spatiotemporal development of neural circuits from diverse neuron types in the mouse prefrontal cortex, a brain region that plays a key role in cognition. I will follow a cross-sectional approach to unravel the effects of distinct mutations on neuronal wiring in the prefrontal cortex in two mouse models of autism (Cntnap2-/-, Syngap1+/-). My work will provide an innovative experimental platform and provide mechanistic insights into the developmental algorithms that the genome uses to encode the connectome.

Mots-clés : molecular connectomics,cellular barcoding,spatial transcriptomics,neural circuit development
Projet ERC : INVIVO-CAR-T (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and I mmunotherapy
Entité participante : Institut Karolinska — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1503155.0 €

T cells expressing chimeric antigen receptors (CAR) have transformed cell therapies against some hematological cancers. As a postdoc, I evolved a synthetic adeno-associated virus (AAV) with tropism against murine T cells, providing a unique tool to study gene targeted T cells in immunocompetent cancer models. In this proposal, capitalizing on my break-through, I will develop novel strategies to generate gene targeted CAR-T cells in vivo, optimizing AAV delivery in immunocompetent mouse models and combining these methods with technologies for Cas9 delivery for T cell-specific gene editing. The ultimate goal of my proposal is to develop methods that can be translated to clinical trials in humans. Therefore, I will establish a humanized mouse model that allows for targeting of human T cells in vivo, in which key findings from this research project will be translated for proof-of-concept experiments. As the first ever study of gene targeted T cells in vivo, this ground-breaking research will provide in-depth profiling of in vivo engineered CAR-T cells and their therapeutic potential. This study is a necessary first step forwards toward accessible and affordable in vivo generated CAR-T cell therapies in humans. Furthermore, to extend the use of CAR-T cells against solid tumor, I have developed an AAV-based platform to perform pooled knock-in T cell screens in immunocompetent solid tumor mouse models. For this research proposal, I have designed a library of synthetic costimulatory receptors to be expressed with a CAR at the Trac locus to improve T cell fitness and persistence. By combining advanced T cell engineering with analysis on single-cell level, these pioneering experiments will answer crucial questions for T cell therapies and tumor biology. To succeed with my ambitious and unconventional proposal, I plan to join the Department of Medicine, Huddinge, at the Karolinska Institute. Building a collaborative team in an excellent translational research environment.

Mots-clés : genetic engineering,aav,in vivo delivery,gene targeting,car t cells therapies,synthetic receptors
Projet ERC : LUMEN (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : École polytechnique de Milan — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : PoliMi
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499967.0 €

Transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) is a promising non-invasive technology capable of targeting specific brain regions to treat, among others, movement disorders such as essential tremor and Parkinson’s disease tremor. Yet, its effectiveness is currently limited by the excitation of leaky Lamb waves, which radiate energy at arbitrary angles in the brain, causing undesired aberrations. To mitigate these effects, the state-of-the-art technology for tFUS relies on patient-tailored aberration compensation strategies that take advantage of more invasive techniques, such as MRI guidance and X-Rays, making tFUS not accessible for all patients, expensive, and not readily available for small-scale laboratories. LUMEN addresses these challenges by dressing the patient with acoustic metasurfaces, engineered structures designed to manipulate wave propagation. Instead of compensating for aberrations a posteriori, this project leverages acoustic metasurfaces to control the leaky-wave radiation mechanism at the source, creating functional devices able to focus ultrasound without the need for more invasive and complex correction strategies, thereby revolutionizing the focusing mechanism of tFUS. This approach not only aims to make tFUS more affordable, but also enhances the ability of tFUS to reach peripherical regions of the brain that are typically hard to access and provides a focusing mechanism effective across diverse skull geometries, making it suitable to treat different patients. The outcomes of this research have the potential to transform the treatment landscape for millions suffering from tremor disorders, neuropathic pain, cancer-related pain, while also advancing the fields of wave physics, medical imaging, and therapeutic technology. Achieving these goals could lead to more inclusive, non-invasive therapeutic options, greatly improving patients' quality of life and reducing healthcare costs globally.

Mots-clés : phononic crystals acoustic metamaterials leaky waves time varying media transcranial focused ultrasound neuromodulation
Projet ERC : MINIONS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : École polytechnique de Milan — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : PoliMi
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1281363.5 €

External-beam radiotherapy has been established as best practice care in different cancer cases, although current models applied in the clinics to tune the treatment plan dosimetry, as a function of the expected tumour response and radiation-induced toxicity, do not make use of patient-specific information, but rely on radiobiological parameters typically derived from in-vitro experiments, thus abdicating from describing the in-vivo complexity of the pathology. MINIONS is a cutting-edge research programme that investigates and integrates a set of activities to implement patient-specific microstructural and radiobiological models in personalized radiotherapy treatment planning and adaptation towards a detailed description of tumour characteristics of each patient and thus significantly improved tumour control probability. The main challenge of MINIONS is to create, for the first time, a real-time patient-specific model able to describe the microscopic characteristic of the tumour and its interaction with the radiation beam. The scientific activities of MINIONS are to achieve and merge: (i) Monte-Carlo (MC) simulations of Diffusion Magnetic Resonance (DW-MR) signals and radiation-tissue interactions on a library of in-silico cellular substrates to obtain an integrated simulation platform; (ii) real-time Artificial Intelligence-based techniques to accelerate MC simulations and make them compatible with fast treatment planning and adaptation; (ii) advanced DW-MR imaging, to retrieve non-invasively the information required to feed the simulation platform for the implementation of patient-specific microstructural and radiobiological models. The design of in-vivo and ex-vivo tests allows validating the model performance and the collaboration of researchers, engineers and clinicians will drive the use of this innovative strategy in clinical routine, to increase survival and quality of life for a wide range of cancer patients.

Mots-clés : personalised radiotherapy,microstructural and radiobilogical modelling in radiotherapy,diffusion mri in radiotherapy,monte carlo simulations in radiotherapy,artificial intelligence in radiotherapy
Projet ERC : EOS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Materials Engineering
Entité participante : École polytechnique de Milan — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : PoliMi
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

EOS wants to create a new class of biohybrid living materials capable to perceive light and perform tasks remotely (i.e. drug delivery in hard-to-reach body locations). I propose to achieve this by inducing light sensitivity into non-photosynthetic motile bacteria at minimum invasiveness and complexity. Based on the notion that the active manipulation of the bacteria membrane potential allows controlling bacterial functions, including motion, EOS challenge is how to trigger effectively a membrane potential dynamics. EOS will employ a materials-based approach that I call “optobacterial-stimulation” and is composed by two key ingredients: i. light as a spatiotemporal precise tool that can control bacteria remotely; ii. phototransducing organic materials that associate spontaneously with bacterial cells without the need for neither covalent attachment nor genetic modification. The phototransducing mechanism stems from the “cross-talking” between molecular excitations and the polarization state of cells. The photoinduced membrane potential dynamics is ultimately linked to ion motive force, and thus to the bacterial flagellar motor. All these abovementioned elements have in common the study of light-matter interaction, which represents my main research interest in the last decade. Using optobacterial-stimulation I will answer to three outstanding questions that are related to each other and shape EOS objectives: i. can we engineer bacteria to perceive light through exogenous phototransducers? ii. are bacteria able to perceive different photostimulation approaches, as dictated by molecular excited states, in terms of membrane potential dynamics and motion? iii. can we understand the relationship between the fate of excited states and bacterial function? In the case study, I will demonstrate phototactic guidance of “eyeless” bacteria that are competent to swim in the gastrointestinal tract, with the view to develop intrinsically bio-compatible microswimmers.

Mots-clés : biohybrid living materials,organic phototransducers,bacteria photostimulation,photodriven bacteria microswimmers
Projet ERC : GLITR (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
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 : 2320575.0 €

A rigorous understanding of the role of turbulence, with its wide range of scales and phenomena, on mass transport across a gas-liquid interface (GLI) is one of the remaining challenges in fluid mechanics. Its importance is illustrated by considering that nearly 50% of anthropogenic CO2 is driven into the oceans by a turbulent process we do not fully understand. We know that turbulence modifies the topology of the GLI from both the liquid and gas sides, but due to the complexity of the problem, we do not understand the dominant mechanisms that control this process or how they connect to mass transfer. My previous work has both shown how turbulence can be tailored in the lab and how the parameters of the turbulence influence shear on a surface, making me well placed to tackle this problem. A plethora of models based on limited data exist for mass transfer across a GLI, but they have contrasting backgrounds, parameters, and results. This is indicative that something is missing and that there is a critical need for deeper understanding of the underlying phenomena.  GLITR will provide a step change in our understanding of phenomena at the GLI by initiating a paradigm shift in the way lab experiments are conducted, considering the complexity of interacting turbulent gas and liquid flows for the first time. Tailored turbulence with adjustable intensity and length scales will be generated with an active turbulence generator in both the gas and liquid simultaneously to provide new insight not previously accessible. This will result in deformed interfaces that will necessitate the development of new methods to investigate the associated mass transport and fluid mechanics. Correlations between the tailored turbulence in both the gas and liquid, the surface topology, and the mass transport across the GLI will enable the development of data-driven models and breakthroughs in our understanding of interfacial phenomena while initiating a wholly new way of addressing this problem.

Mots-clés : turbulence,mass transport,gas liquid interface