Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : PrintNano4Fluo (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

After two decades of parallel developments in single molecule fluorescence techniques and nanophotonics, these two fields remain largely disconnected today. The aim of the PrintNano4Fluo project is to bridge this gap and bring nanophotonics tools to the end users single molecule microscopists. Our objective is to develop a new cost-effective and scalable nanofabrication approach of nanophotonic devices to enhance single molecule fluorescence detection. The PrintNano4Fluo solution offers a unique set of advantages: it is low-cost, fast, scalable and safe while still providing a high optical performance of the final. Bringing nanophotonics tools to the end users single molecule microscopists is a major element of novelty to break into the physical limits set by diffraction where no other alternative exists today.
Projet ERC : MultiPhase (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Quantitative phase microscopies (QPMs) experienced a strong gain of interest this last decade, expecially for bioimaging applications. Mapping the phase of a light beam enables biologists to enhance the contrast of live cells in culture without invasive fluorescent labelling. It also enables the unprecedented capability of QPMs to accurately measure the biomass of live cells observed by optical microscopy. This capability, out of reach using fluorescence microscopy, yields an accurate control of the growth rate of cells in culture. Quadriwave lateral shearing interferometry is a high-resolution wavefront sensing technique that has been used as a QPM for 10 years. It represents a simple, yet robust and accurate, QPM that has already been applied not only in biology, but also in nanophotonics for the first time, by the PI, to characterize objects such as nanoparticles, 2D materials and metasurfaces, expanding the range of application of QLSI. However, like any other QPM technique, QLSI is based on the assumption that the imaged light field is scalar. While this assumption is fine for some applications, for others, it yields a loss of information because QPMs do not capture the whole information a beam can contain. In the MultiPhase project, we wish to expand the capabilities of QLSI by developing an experimental methodology to retrieve the polarization information of the light field, in intensity and phase. The applicability of this new methodology will be tested and illustrated by conducting proof-of-concept experiments related to applications in nanophotonics and biomicroscopy. Finally, a software to pilot the system will be developed.
Projet ERC : PowerPact (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Day one societa a responsabilita limitata — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : DAY ONE
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 50000.0 €

Waste heat makes up a very large fraction of the energy produced today. The process chain of energy conversion of chemical energy into power is subject to up to 72% loss. Recovering this waste heat will be crucial for enhancing the efficiency of processes. Today approaches such as thermoelectric energy conversion are receiving interest due to their ability to turn waste energy back into useful electrical energy. However, the wider adoption of this technology is being held back due to the low efficiency (< 5-8%) of current thermoelectric devices, the need for a temperature gradient, and the scarcity of state-of-the-art materials. Recently, a new device, the 'thermal battery', was proposed. Until now, the thermal battery concept has been explored using liquid electrolytes. However, liquid electrolytes severely restrict the operation temperature range to ΔT<50 K. In PowerPact, the goal is to create a pioneering prototype that features a high-temperature battery made of solid-state electrolytes and electrodes using "artificial oxide heterostructures," which can stack together on demand. This design will enable the battery to charge at high temperatures and discharge at low temperatures, effectively using waste heat recovery. The overall goal is to achieve a proof of concept capable of storing energy within the range of milliampere-hours (mAh) to watt-hours (Wh) that is suitable for small consumer electronics. Through this development, we seek to lay the basis for a new class of 'thermal battery' that directly captures and stores waste heat. To realize this vision, we need to radically redesign the 'thermal battery' technology, where our thermal battery features a unique charging mechanism; it operates at a constant temperature. This breakthrough advances a new concept in thermal batteries, designed to connect current thermoelectric technologies with solid-based thermal batteries. To date, however, solid-state thermal batteries have remained elusive.
Projet ERC : INVENT (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Day one societa a responsabilita limitata — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : DAY ONE
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 30000.0 €

Significant adoption of renewable sources will be witnessed in future years to meet the long-term objective of CO2 neutrality and mitigate the effects of global warming. While electrification will play a key role in the transition to a sustainable energy system, combustion processes will remain part of the picture, requiring sustainable combustion technologies and renewable synthetic fuels. The design and development of novel combustion technologies in power and heat generation, transportation and manufacturing processes require developing a digital combustion infrastructure that promises to bring down the needed R&D investments for meeting the tightening environmental regulations. However, predicting combustion processes is a complex and challenging task, and the tools available today fall very short of what is needed for new design and optimisation. We made an innovation that formed a digital twin, combining theory, experiments, simulations and machine learning into one unique combination. With our approach, we can predict complex multi-physics systems that can be used for designing combustion-based energy generation applications for growing markets. Our approach is expected to impact significantly new combustion systems while reducing the resources and time for designing such fuel-flexible, nonpolluting and energy-efficient systems. This is expected to have vast commercialisation potential in the industries 1) designing environmentally friendly energy systems and 2) supplying digital tools for the design processes.
Projet ERC : GRASP (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Inserm
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 70000.0 €

PCOS is the most common endocrine disorder affecting up to 18% of women worldwide. The syndrome imposes a heavy health burden, covering infertility, obesity, type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. The development of treatment options is an urgent need since there is currently neither a cure nor mechanism-based treatments, leaving patient management suboptimal and focused solely on symptomatic treatment. One key neuroendocrine aberration in most women with PCOS is increased luteinizing hormone (LH) pulse frequency. This suggests an increase in activity of gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) neurons in the hypothalamus. The LH hyper-pulsatility contributes to increased ovarian thecal androgen secretion and failure of ovulation, constituting a pivotal pathogenic role in the syndrome. These evidences suggest that alterations of GnRH neuronal activity/secretion could be the basis for neuroendocrine anomalies that accompany the reproductive disturbances in the syndrome. In GRASP we will test the hypothesis that low administration doses of a GnRH antagonist, aimed at tempering LH secretion/pulsatility, can ameliorate both reproductive and metabolic PCOS traits in animal models of PCOS and in women with PCOS. The specific objectives of GRASP are to i) dose-range GnRH antagonism to rectify LH pulse amplitude and frequency in PCOS-like mice ; ii) to perform a long-term treatment with the selected doses of GnRH antagonist to assess its potential beneficial outcomes in correcting reproductive and metabolic alterations of this preclinical model; iii) to perform a pilot dose-effect clinical investigation testing the ability of sub-therapeutic doses of GnRH antagonist to rectify the altered hormonal dynamics in women with PCOS. The overall goal of GRASP is to provide a proof-of-concept for future long-duration randomized controlled trials of this approach to appraise its clinical benefits in women with PCOS and to move forward towards therapeutic innovation.
Projet ERC : CiThOss (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Lund — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Bones represent a privileged site for cancer initiation and metastasis. Yet, current in vitro and animal models fall short in accurately recapitulating bone-developing cancers. To address this, we developed the human ossicle (hOss) technology: the in vivo formation of miniaturized bone organs composed of patient-derived bone and marrow cells. By mimicking the patient’s bone microenvironment, hOss offer a personalized model for studying bone-related cancers. To ensure reproducibility and standardization, we further developed OssiGel—a customized extracellular matrix that reliably supports robust hOss formation from patient-derived cells. This innovation paves the way for advanced therapy testing, particularly for cellular immunotherapies, which still rely heavily on mouse models despite their limited clinical predictive value. Here, we aim to validate hOss as a superior platform for assessing the efficacy of immunotherapies. Using OssiGel, we will generate hOss and evaluate therapeutic responses, directly comparing outcomes in tumors engrafted in mouse bones versus hOss. Our project addresses a critical need to understand how the human bone/bone marrow microenvironment shapes immunotherapy outcomes. It proposes the first in vivo personalized model for testing immunotherapies, offering insight into the variable clinical success of current strategies.
Projet ERC : CANDY (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Inserm
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) is one of the deadliest cancers comprising a heterogeneous cluster of malignancies that are distinct to hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and that can emerge at any point in the biliary tree. While not very common, CCA is responsible for 2% of cancer-related deaths worldwide annually and rising. The incidence in European countries is increasing rapidly ranging from 1 to more than 4 cases/100,000. CCA is mostly diagnosed very late resulting in aggressive disease progression, poor treatment response, and dismal prognosis with a median survival of less than 2 years. Curative hepatic resection is an option in 10-30% cases and is mostly linked to recurrence within 12 months in over 50% of patients. For most patients, diagnosis will occur when the disease is already too advanced, and the only options are chemotherapies or palliative care. Current standard-of-care for CCA is unsatisfactory with very limited efficacy and adverse effects. Recently approved second-line therapeutics slightly improve outcome but are only suited to a small subset of CCA patients. Thus, there is a major unmet medical need for novel therapeutic strategies to improve patient outcome. Based on a robust data package obtained in a panel of CCA models within ERC HEPCIR, here we will explore the use of a novel class of compounds exploiting a unique and differentiated first-in-class mechanism-of-action and validate their efficacy in vivo as a first-line therapeutic for CCA. Proof-of-concept studies will be performed in state-of-the-art patient-derived models combined with scRNASeq and proteomics. The data obtained will serve as a pre-IND data package for this indication. An established collaboration with a pharma partner will ensure fast-track completion of the preclinical development towards IND. Collectively, ERC PoC CANDY will deliver completed proof-of-concept for a novel therapeutic approach for CCA which has the potential to transform patient care.
Projet ERC : iSPEAK (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : RCSI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 44260.0 €

Up to one fifth of young people report that they have experienced unusual perceptual experiences, thoughts or beliefs. These experiences (which we call Psychotic Experiences or PE) can take the form of hearing voices or seeing visions or feeling paranoid or believing things that are not true. As part of my ERC Consolidator Award (iHEAR), I and my team have learned a great deal more about these experiences and what they mean for young people. We know that these experiences can be transitory in most cases but that in some young people they recur throughout adolescence and adulthood. We know that, for some young people, these experiences can be associated with poor functioning and poorer mental health but for others they are not pathological. We have identified the need for an instrument that can differentiate between pathological and non-pathological psychotic experiences. This will support early risk screening and development of interventions among those who experience PE. We propose to search for natural language patterns within self-reported PE that are associated with high and low levels of mental ill-health. Our hypothesis is that young people’s first person account of their experiences are likely to contain natural language phrases that could be used to differentiate between PEs that occur in the context of mental ill-health are likely to require intervention and those that do not. Knowledge of natural language patterns for PE would be a valuable step in improving assessment tools in clinical practice. Additionally this could be a valuable new resource for digital tools and e-Health which is a growing area for mental health.
Projet ERC : EpiSen (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Inserm
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Epilepsy is a frequent neurological disorder characterized by recurrent seizures resulting from hyperexcitability and hypersynchrony of neuronal networks. Cortical malformations, including Focal Cortical Dysplasia (FCD), are rare sporadic diseases that cause early-life drug-resistant seizures for which surgery is the only therapeutic option to control seizures. Surgical inaccessibility and failures are significant clinical drawbacks. This emphasizes a critical and urgent need for new precision-based therapies for this debilitating childhood disorder. In recent years, my team contributed to revealing that FCD are caused by brain somatic mutations in genes belonging to the mTOR pathway, a signaling cascade regulating key physiological cell functions such as growth, proliferation, and metabolism. During the course of my ERC-funded project, we discovered specific biomarkers in both human and mouse preclinical FCD brain tissues. In EpiSen, we propose an innovative pharmacological strategy based on the selective elimination of mutated cells by repurposing available molecules, that are currently used in clinical trials in other diseases, for FCD-related epilepsy. We hypothesize that abnormal cells, once acutely cleared, will offer a prolonged benefit on seizures. Direct users include applied research groups, pharma companies, the medical community for clinical trials, and patient associations.
Projet ERC : BACTOCONTROL (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Inserm
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Engineered microbes are attractive platforms for the diagnosis and treatment of several diseases. For example, bacteria can selectively target tumors and are ideal vehicles for in situ delivery of therapeutic agents. However, as of today, no engineered living bacterial therapeutics in clinical trials have the ability for conditional control of therapeutic activity. This lack of reliable control over the timing and dosage of effector molecule production limits the specificity, safety, and efficacy of current bacterial therapies. In this project, I will use of a generalizable synthetic receptor platform to control the in vivo therapeutic activity of engineered bacteria using an externally administered molecules. As a proof of concept, I will use a receptor responding to a molecule found in the diet to control therapeutic release in tumors. I will use a safe probiotic, E. coli Nissle 1917, with demonstrated tumor targeting properties. In a first research line, I will characterize the dose-response and kinetics of synthetic receptors implemented in bacteria colonizing an in vitro 3D tumor spheroids model. I will then evaluate the therapeutic activity of strains producing cytolytic molecules in response to external inducer. In a second research line, I will characterize conditional control of gene expression and then therapeutic release in tumor mice model, using cytolytic and immunotherapeutic effectors. My work will deliver robust, safe, and efficient frameworks for conditional control of bacterial cancer therapy. By enabling in situ drug delivery with a highly-precise dosage and timing, it will allow physicians and ultimately the patients to finely control bacterial therapeutic activity. Because of its modularity my platform will be further engineerable to detect other conditional inducers. This system will be reusable for the treatment of many other pathologies, including autoimmune and infectious diseases.
Projet ERC : MOUSEVILLAGE (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Fundació Clínic per a la Recerca Biomèdica — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : FCRB
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Drug discovery in mental health is undergoing a crisis. Characterizing a new generation of biomarkers for the different disorders seems the promising path towards developing new treatments. Biomarkers, including behavioral biomarkers, are quantitative observables that are altered and can be used for diagnosis, prognosis or treatment response monitoring. Importantly for preclinical research, these biomarkers should be translational and work across species, but experiments in rodents are largely based on paradigms that are disparate from those used in humans. Training rodents in more human-like tasks has a strong translational potential, but it has important shortcomings: it requires developing finely-controlled tasks involving long training periods, consuming lots of animals and ultimately inducing very elevated personnel costs. To confront this experimental bottleneck , neuroscience and pharmaceutical laboratories are trying to automatize their methods, but still most systems rely on human intervention, require animal manipulation and impose a high maintenance toll. Leveraging our experience building behavioral systems during our ERC-CoG-2015, we will design, build and distribute the Mouse Village (MV), a new fully-automated open platform in which mice self-trained 24/7 in different cognitive tasks while displaying complex social interactions without human intervention. The MV consists in a system of cages connected to an operant touchscreen chamber that can implement multiple cognitive tasks. We will build on a previously developed pilot MV by introducing a more modular and flexible design and validate the system using several standard social and cognitive tests. The MV will be shared to the community under and Open Software and Hardware licenses. By eliminating the experimental bottleneck imposed by behavioral experiments, the MV has the potential to accelerate the search for new biomarkers of brain disorders and have a substantial impact on mental health.
Projet ERC : FEEL-XR (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de la Sarre — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR and AR), often summarized as Extended Reality (XR), is moving from a niche product to a mainstream market. Due to recent advances in wearable sensing and display technologies, powerful VR and AR headsets are commercially available, even for the general public, and promise to become even more miniaturized and cheaper in the coming years. A myriad of important application cases, ranging from gaming or shopping to immersive design and engineering or to tele-surgery and virtual training, demonstrate the large innovation potential of XR. However, today’s technologies and applications for XR predominantly focus on the visual channel alone. In contrast, rendering the haptic feel of objects in XR is still mostly unaddressed, although it is common knowledge that haptic perception is an essential part of how humans experience the world, hence important for realism and immersion. This project sets out to mature the crucial components needed for feel-through tactile feedback in XR that can dynamically augment and alter the haptic feel of real-world objects, surfaces, and the human body. Our technology originates from the applicant’s ERC Starting Grant InteractiveSkin, where we developed the foundations for a new generation of body-worn user interfaces, which we call interactive skin. Our approach is unique in proposing computational design and rapid manufacturing of stretchable electronics as a means to customize on-body interfaces. FEEL-XR will enable tactile augmentation of the human body through a less than 35 μm thin tactile interface for wearable computing, which retains the natural tactile acuity (similar to bare skin) while delivering high-density tactile output, suitable for applications in tactile XR and on-skin interaction. As there are no moving parts, we can expect our technology to be built much cheaper than current solutions that rely on motors or pneumatics, at the same time being better suited for battery-powered usages.