Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : MemoryIndex (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université Otto von Guericke de Magdebourg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : OVGU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 215000.0 €

Episodic memories make us who we are, yet how these memories are coded in the human brain remains an open question. We know that the human hippocampus is essential for turning unique experiences into memory episodes, such as a memory from the last concert you have attended. We also know that the human hippocampus has two types of neurons that could be critical for coding such episodic memories. These are Concept Cells, which store general semantic concepts (i.e. the artist, or the location where the concert was), and Episode Specific Neurons, which hold together all the elements that belong to an episode (i.e. seeing Taylor Swift performing in Edinburgh). Concept cells, which are well-known, represent a context invariant and highly abstract code for certain elements that matter to us, such as a certain place, or a certain person. In contrast, Episodic Specific Neurons, which have only recently been observed, represent a conjunctive code that uniquely identifies individual episodes. However, how these two types of neural codes are used by the hippocampus to code episodic memories is unclear. Specifically, we don’t know whether and how Episode Specific Neurons and Concept Cells interact with each other and with the neocortex. We don’t know where in the hippocampus they are, how they are allocated to code for a memory, and whether they are causally relevant for human episodic memory. The aim of MemoryIndex is to answer these questions via testing computationally motivated hypotheses in a multimodal project using a unique combination of human single neuron recordings, ultra-high field fMRI and invasive electrical stimulation. The results of this project will critically advance our understanding of the fundamental coding mechanisms that the human hippocampus uses for storing episodic memories. These findings could potentially pave the way for developing a neural prosthesis to restore memory function in patients.

Mots-clés : episodic memory,hippocampus,human single neurons
Projet ERC : CLIMGROW (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Université autonome de Barcelone — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2454000.0 €

Climate change has revived the debate on growth-vs-environment which may intensify in coming years. This project studies to what extent concerns about economic growth, ranging from pro- to anti-growth, hamper social-political support for ambitious climate policy, and how this can be amended. Using surveys, experiments and interviews, it assesses whether beliefs about growth-vs-environment affect policy opinions of distinct stakeholders (voters, policymakers, journalists, etc.), and if this is moderated by preferences regarding instrument types, such as standards, taxes or subsidies. The project further tests the role of information by comparing the effect of distinct beyond-GDP metrics on views about growth vs climate policy. In addition, it studies how growth concerns relate to the design of pledges in the Paris Agreement, as these demarcate national climate policies. Based on collected data and derived insights, the project then undertakes system-dynamics and agent-based modelling to study the co-dynamics of climate-policy design and support. This will create models of the “dynamic policy-support cycle” (DPSC), comprising policy design, economic and emission impacts, opinion dynamics (i.e. support/resistance), and policy adaptation. It involves comparing growth strategies and climate policies using distinct beyond-GDP metrics, and connecting this to stakeholder opinion dynamics. Informed by the model results, in a third part the project explores whether an agrowth strategy, which is precautious towards both economic and climate risks, can increase support for ambitious climate policy. Given stakeholder diversity, we perform interviews to decide about tailored strategies in this respect. Similar proposals to agrowth, notably under the label of “post-growth”, will be examined as well. The ultimate aim is to learn about dynamic packages with climate-policy instruments and a/post-growth measures that culminate in majority support for ambitious climate policy.

Mots-clés : climate policy,public support,public opinion,economic growth,gdp,beyond gdp,stakeholders,welfare indicators,paris agreement,post growth,agent based model
Projet ERC : B3M (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and I mmunotherapy
Entité participante : Université de Münster — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Universität Münster
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2300451.0 €

In neuroinflammation leukocytes reside for several days in the perivascular niche of cerebral blood vessels - defined by the basal surface of the endothelium, the endothelial basement membrane (BM) and an outer parenchymal BM with associated astrocyte endfeet (Fig. 1) - a poorly studied site but of utmost fundamental and clinical relevance. This site is also emerging as harbouring genetically distinct resident cell populations, the function of which are unclear. BMs define the perivascular niche and the sealed nature of this compartment in an unknown manner. B3M will explore the perivascular niche of cerebral vessels. Using our new dextran-hydrogel with tuneable adhesive, stiffness and degradability properties and cerebral endothelial cells derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) we will recreate the subendothelial site; we will sequentially increase its complexity to reflect the in vivo spatial arrangement of cells and BMs, within the most correctly mimicked environmental properties, in a system that permits perfusion with immune cells and live imaging. Parallel ex vivo and synthetic approaches will further break down the complexity of this site into discrete steps and using multiscale imaging of new split-cre transgenic mice we will track, target and profile perivascular cells lacking BM receptors. Studies to date on leukocyte entry into the brain focus on endothelial properties or immune cell behaviour with little consideration of the 3D relationship between cellular and BM barriers and their functional interdependence. My unique knowledge on extracellular matrix structure/function of cerebral vessels and leukocyte migration into the brain, allows me to identify key elements of the perivascular niche and how they can be mimicked in vitro and targeted in vivo. B3M’s cross-disciplinary approach will decipher cellular and molecular events occurring after leukocyte penetration of the endothelium in the perivascular niche, shedding light on a black box.

Mots-clés : neuroinflammation,perivascular space,biomimetic models,basement membrane
Projet ERC : STEADY (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Leibniz-Gemeinschaft — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : WLG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2358250.0 €

Engineered Living Materials (ELMs) are dynamically emerging at the intersection of synthetic biology and materials sciences and are providing solutions in a rapidly growing number of application fields. Current areas of application comprise, for example, biomedicine, textiles, sensors, soft robotics, electronics, or construction materials. From a conceptual point of view, ELMs provide the opportunity of endowing materials with properties and functions long sought for in materials sciences, such as adaptivity and interactivity, evolvability, hierarchical design, self-reproduction, energy harvesting from the environment, synthesis from renewable resources, as well as biodegradability. Despite intensive research, however, a key defining property of life is largely missing in ELMs, that is homeostasis. Homeostasis is the ability of a system to maintain an inner steady state despite external fluctuations that impact this state. For example, mammals maintain a constant body temperature despite varying external temperatures. In STEADY, we will develop and test the concept of engineering homeostasis into living materials. To this aim, we will develop three genetically encoded modules, (i) a sensor to sense the actual state of a specific mechanical property of the material, (ii) a controller to process the sensor signal, and (iii) an actuator, that, based on the controller’s output, steers the material towards the setpoint. The design of the homeostatic system will be highly modular, so that the sensor and actuator can be adapted in order to maintain homeostasis for other properties or functions of the material. The tools developed here are not restricted to ELMs but may also be used to confer homeostasis to polymer-based soft materials with regard to maintaining a desired feature. Thus, STEADY will open novel opportunities for engineering materials to be robust and resilient to changing environmental conditions.

Mots-clés : engineered living materials
Projet ERC : IMMENSE (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced 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 : 2500000.0 €

Forests, insect swarms, bones during remodeling, are striking examples of biological systems whose elements possess the ability to sense and exchange signals. These signals are exploited to adapt to evolving environmental conditions and to learn how to improve performance, in some cases without a centralized control. Can materials and structures be enabled with the same capabilities? How can we build devices that exchange information on a mechanistic base and exploit these to learn how to optimally react to external stimuli? To what extent can materials and structures be endowed with active inference processes which mimic brain activities? Finding answers to these questions is the challenge of IMMENSE, with the overarching aim to create materials and structures able to sense, exchange signals, interpret and compare them, thus achieving self-learning and self-adaptation. This will be a major step toward the design of sentient materials and structures. Solid and structural mechanics, solid-fluid interaction, smart architected metamaterials, coupled with multi-physics phenomena at micro and macro scales, will be combined to implement sensing and signal control abilities on mechanistic bases. Complex dynamic responses of oscillator arrays, coupled with physical “in materia” computing replicating classification and learning processes, will be innovative tools designed to implement learning and reacting abilities. Experiments will be performed at micro and meso scales on “ad hoc” designed proof of principles prototypes, to obtain evidence of sentient materials and structures. IMMENSE will set the stage for a new class of materials and structures implemented with local, decentralized sensing, monitoring and reacting abilities and will open to a variety of new applications, including local self-healing of construction materials and biomedical prosthesis, new monitoring and control of industrial appliances, advanced unmanned vehicles and satellites.

Mots-clés : solid and structural mechanics computational mechanics micromechanics
Projet ERC : NABUCCO (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced 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 : 2342038.0 €

The NABUCCO project aims to develop radically new concepts of adaptive and buckling-driven composite structures for next generation aircraft. In aeronautics, buckling is generally avoided because it causes stiffness reduction, large deformations, and can result in a catastrophic collapse. Instead, NABUCCO considers buckling no longer as a phenomenon to be avoided, but as a design opportunity to be explored for its ground-breaking potentialities. The idea is to use buckling drawbacks in a positive way, to conceive, design and realize adaptive structures and aircraft morphing wings. These new, lighter, flexible structures will be designed considering all the potentialities offered by composite materials, thanks also to novel manufacturing processes, and modifying the boundary conditions to govern when buckling occurs and to tune multiple non-traditional post-buckling stable configurations. These structures will be able to adapt their shape during different flight conditions, acting on two of the biggest levers for the future of clean aviation: reduced weight and increased efficiency. The concepts proposed in NABUCCO will require a step change for what concerns the design, analysis and optimization methodologies, since the design space will be significantly enlarged and the designer will need the ability to identify, manage and control the buckling phenomena. These solutions can be obtained by adopting an integrated design approach established on a multi-disciplinary thinking. A strongly coupled computational-experimental framework will be developed based on novel analytical formulations, artificial intelligence techniques for large multi-objective optimizations, high-fidelity simulation methodologies and advanced test techniques.

Mots-clés : buckling,aircraft composite structures,morphing wing,analytical formulation for stability,structural optimization,artificial neural networks,post buckling tests
Projet ERC : MONOFUN-CV (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : Université Louis-et-Maximilien de Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : LMU
Type d'entité : Organismes publics (hors enseignement & recherche)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499740.0 €

Atherosclerosis is the major underlying pathology of cardiovascular diseases (CVD), which remain the leading cause of death worldwide. The relevance of miRNAs in vascular biology, atherosclerosis and CVD has been well established. Our discovery of an aptamer-like binding of an endogenous miRNA to proteins, namely that of nuclear miR-126-5p to caspase-3, as facilitated by the RNA-binding protein MEX3A has extended the classical paradigm of miRNA function in the RISC, adding a new layer to the mechanisms enacted by miRNAs. Taking MEX3A as a starting point, MONO-FUN-CV aims to (1) characterize cell-specific contributions of MEX3A to mouse atherosclerosis and an association of MEX3a risk variants with human atherosclerosis, to dissect the specificity of its cross-talk with miR-126-5p, and to unravel potential MEX3A-based therapeutic options; we will (2) conduct an unbiased analysis of miRNAs affected by MEX3A (e.g. by eCLIP), elucidate the structural basis and mechanisms controlling MEX3A functions, e.g. ternary complex formation with AGO2, nuclear shuttling, and involvement of other adaptors (proteins, RNA); and (3) we will clarify structural bases and sequence requirements of miR-126-5p interactions with caspase-3, and its physiological relevance using novel in vivo models, as well as screen other miRNAs and proteins engaging in functional interactions, such as miR-210-5p and HIF-1α, to define templates for novel molecular modulators, e.g. aptamers. All aims include unbiased strategies to discover related miRNAs (e.g. nuclear, MEX3A-interacting) and adaptors contributing to the control of protein functions. These aims are highly interconnected and may enable groundbreaking insights into non-canonical mechanisms of miRNAs and their translation into novel approaches for therapeutic targeting of CVD and beyond.

Mots-clés : microrna,atherosclerosis,rna therapeutics
Projet ERC : CHORDS (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Université d'Aarhus — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2470023.0 €

Software systems are critical for the infrastructure of modern society and software errors and security breaches pose enormous costs and risks. The traditional method of testing software systems is famously inadequate for guaranteeing the absence of errors and security breaches since not all execution paths are covered by testing. This is espcially true for concurrent and distributed systems, where there are simply too many execution paths to test, and it has motivated research in formal methods for program verification that can offer mathematical proofs that all system behaviors meet some desirable property.  To formally analyze and reason about software systems it is important to consider models at many different levels of abstraction. Since many real software errors and security breaches stem from subtle problems in implementations of software systems, we focus on detailed, so-called semantic, models of program execution.  While there has been much research on abstract models for reasoning about distributed systems, there has been very little work on compositional verification of implementations of distributed systems. Compositional verification enables specification and verification of individual software modules and their composition, and is key to achieving scalable methods that apply to large programs, but the devel- opment of logics and methods for compositional reasoning is hard.  For concurrent, non-distributed, programs there has been tremendous progress in the last decade on program logics for compositional verification, in particular through the development of so-called higher- order concurrent separation logics. Leveraging this progress, CHORDS will research and develop new theories, program logics, and methods for mathematically rigorous compositional reasoning about implementations of distributed systems and thus lay the foundation for tools that will help programmers make more correct and secure distributed systems.

Mots-clés : program verification,separation logic,distributed systems
Projet ERC : BorderControl (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Cell Biology, Development, Stem Cells and R egeneration
Entité participante : Université de Turku — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

During dissemination, cancer cells must face and overcome several physiological borders, including the immediate stroma for local invasion and the endothelium for long-distance metastasis. At these critical junctures, cell plasticity between epithelial (E) and mesenchymal (M) states could determine metastasis potential. Based on our preliminary data, ideally-positioned cues emanating from the normal stroma contain the tumour in situ. Once this first border is breached, rare cancer cell-endothelial interactions trigger further dissemination through the vascular border. Moreover, cancer cell plasticity is vital throughout this process, enabling optimal response to distinct border microenvironments. In BorderControl, we will build on our cutting-edge cell biology expertise and close collaboration with clinicians to define the molecular signals underlying these border “crossings” and gain unprecedented information on how cancer cells overwhelm these natural defences. Starting with patient tissues, we will spatially profile the tumour-stroma border to identify receptor-ligand pairs that regulate invasion. We will use microfluidics to image, catch and profile cancer cell crossings at endothelial hotspots and determine key molecular regulators of the process in endothelial and cancer cells. Building on our novel discovery of endosomally regulated E-M cell states, we will test how E-M transitions impact border-breaching potential. These novel concepts will be investigated with interdisciplinary methods (scRNAseq, synthetic biology, colour barcoded HTS) and our new technologies (dynamically tuneable multicell-type migration and invasion imaging platforms) to determine the specific interactions/mechanisms regulating border crossings. Finally, we will take the molecular level discoveries from the cancer-limiting borders back to the patients, assessing clinical relevance using designer TMAs, and expect to uncover novel biomarkers and therapeutically actionable targets.

Mots-clés : cancer,metastasis,receptor ligand interaction,advanced light microscopy,patient samples,e cadherin,cell cell adhesion
Projet ERC : TOTALBODY (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université de Turku — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2455842.5 €

The goal of the TOTALBODY project is to establish the interacting biological networks supporting human emotions and their disorders across the brain and periphery using novel total-body positron emission tomography (PET) approach. The body-to-brain axis maps visceral signals onto emotions, driving complex motivated behaviours. Negative emotions are risk factors for cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) Conversely, CVDs are associated with anxiety, highlighting the link between negative emotions, bodily functions, and somatic health. Systems-level interaction between brain and peripheral organs could thus be a key pathway underlying psychiatric disorders, but it remains poorly understood. TOTALBODY tackles this question from ground-breaking viewpoint by implementing novel total-body PET approach for measuring the physiology of the emotion circuits across the brain and body, creating an innovative multisystem biology approach for studying emotions. We simultaneously map activity in the brain and peripheral organs during pharmacologically and psychologically induced emotions in a large sample (n=240) of healthy volunteers and patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Links between CVDs, GAD, and whole-body emotion circuit activation are mapped in a clinical study involving 300 patients with suspected CVD. The data are analysed using state-of-the art multi-organ modelling framework developed in the context of the project. Advanced pattern recognition techniques implemented on the whole dataset (540 subjects) are used for discerning the central-peripheral pathways associated with future onset of anxiety and CVD. Anxiety and CVDs constitute a major burden for health and well-being worldwide. This unique large-scale analysis of the central-peripheral axis of anxiety and cardiac functioning enables delineating biological and psychological mechanisms that generate the central and peripheral anxious state and burden the cardiovascular system predisposing individuals to CVD.

Mots-clés : emotion,anxiety,positron emission tomography,embodiment,anxiety,cardiovascular diseases,psychophysiology