Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : PALMADS (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 €

Photosynthesis is at the intersection of many vexing problems facing humanity, including feeding an ever-increasing population, securing the agricultural economy, replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy, and responding to climate changes. Studying this fundamental process and exploring its functional biodiversity is a crucial necessity. Indeed, photosynthesis is a perfect tool for environmental monitoring in a context of climate changes; it probes in a non-invasive way the physiological state of a photosynthetic organism, its response to the environment. Moreover, the discovery across diversity of new response mechanisms to environmental cues, new metabolic pathways or regulatory mechanisms also constitutes a reservoir for biotechnological mining or crop improvement. In-depth measurements of plant photosynthesis are now possible in the field with the development of dedicated portable instruments, combining chlorophyll fluorescence and absorption difference spectrometry. However, such approaches do not exist in the aquatic world, where most of the diversity of photosynthetic organisms is yet located, because the sensitivity of absorption difference spectrometers is not sufficient for natural samples characterized by very low concentrations of microalgae. Furthermore, a very small proportion of microalgal species are currently cultivated and of these, very few are “lab rats” reaching high cell concentrations. For all these reasons, a huge part of photosynthetic biodiversity escapes us. In this project, we propose to develop a high sensitivity absorption difference spectrometer which will allow measuring photosynthesis in diluted samples of one or more microalgal species. We believe that the development of such an instrument will constitute a real breakthrough in the study of photosynthesis, allowing to explore the diversity of architectures, pathways and regulations of aquatic photosynthesis.

Mots-clés : transient absorption spectrometry,photosynthesis,phytoplankton,biophysics,scientific instrumentation
Projet ERC : UltraCoherentCL (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université Christian Albrecht de Kiel — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Exploring the optical responses of materials at the nanoscale is central to various fields of study, including quantum-sensitive measurement metrologies, photovoltaics, and optoelectronic devices. Electron probes have established themselves as important tools for visualizing nano-optical excitations with unprecedented spatial resolution. However, controlling optical excitations and exploring their decoherence dynamics require visualizing the dynamics of the nano-world at sub-femtosecond temporal resolutions. Within the context of our ERC Starting Grant "NanoBeam," we have established and proposed an electron-probe technique that not only allows us to explore dynamics at nanometer spatial and femtosecond temporal resolutions but also does so at a low cost. Unlike state-of-the-art ultrafast electron microscopy, our method does not rely on external laser excitations but rather on internal electron-driven photon sources. To visualize the decoherence dynamics in a variety of systems, including quantum emitters and networks, optical excitations of two-dimensional materials, and semiconducting optoelectronic devices, we plan to merge the electron-driven photon sources with a cathodoluminescence spectroscopy setup based on optical fiber technology. We will design piezo stages and sample holders that enable precise alignment and tuning of the sample, electron-driven photon sources, and fibers inside the microscope while efficiently collecting cathodoluminescence photons. Our electron-driven photon sources are designed to facilitate a high photon yield, allowing for optimal investigation of nonlinear processes. The instrument will be tested and verified for applications in mapping the decoherence dynamics of quantum emitters coupled to photonic structures, optical excitations in two-dimensional materials, and charge transfer dynamics in photovoltaic devices.

Mots-clés : cathodoluminescence ultrafast spectroscopy decoherence
Projet ERC : EpiGrid (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Souhoka tessa — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : PRODUCTZAKEN
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 22000.0 €

Epilepsy is a highly prevalent brain disorder affecting 1% of the population. Brain surgery can cure epilepsy if we can delineate the diseased tissue intra-operatively. Unfortunately this delineation is currently not performed precisely and leads to poor success rates (50-70%). High frequency oscillations (HFOs) have been identified as a biomarker of epileptogenic tissues, which can be electrically recorded with intraoperative electrocorticography. These HFOs are specific of diseased epileptogenic brain tissues and remnance after an initial resection predicts continuation of seizures after surgery and thus may indicate incomplete removal. The problem is that currently available electrode grids do not provide an adequate recording resolution (too low electrode density). Moreover these electrodes are made of stiff materials, which yields low signal-to-noise level when recording from the cortical surface and which does not offer the possibility to record from within resection cavities, as the rigid electrodes cannot conform to the curvature of the cavity. We need high density flexible electrode grids that can adhere to the cortical surface and cavities. Neurosoft Bioelectronics produces flexible and high density electrode grids based on unique stretchable soft electrodes. Our goal is to use this grant to translate our clinical needs into an optimal design of soft electrode grids adapted for epilepsy surgery, with the help of an industrial designer. We will first test these newly designed soft electrodes in vitro for clinical handability and improved signal quality, and eventually test them during epilepsy surgery in 12 patients. The recorded signals and clinical outcomes will be compared to those from standard rigid electrode grids. Improved delineation of the epileptogenic tissue will lead to a higher succes rate, make epilepsy surgery a first choice treatment, and over all change this otherwise life-long disease into a curable disorder for many people.
Projet ERC : COMBICODE (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Dortmund — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

In mammalian genomes, epigenetic modifications of the nucleobase cytosine occur in both strands of the DNA duplex in the sequence “CpG”, and they are central regulators of gene expression as well as important cancer biomarkers. However, current analytical techniques cannot reveal the combination in that these modifications occur in the two strands of a DNA duplex. The resulting inability to create genomic maps of these “CpG duplex modifcations” represents a major roadblock for future developments in epigenetics research and cancer diagnosis. We have engineered the first affinity enrichment probes for selectively analysing novel CpG duplex modifications, and integrated them into user-friendly and cost-effective kits for genomic mapping. In this project, we will develop and commercialize two kits for mapping of the most important novel CpG duplex modification consisting of 5-methylcytosine and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine for the epigenetics research and the liquid biopsy markets. This will provide decisive new impulses for epigenetics research as well as for cancer biomarker discovery and liquid biopsy, both large and rapidly growing markets.
Projet ERC : REPRO-PTP (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université libre de Bruxelles — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ULB
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

REPRO-PTP is addressing the critical need for effective treatments in obesity-associated hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). HCC, which accounts for 90% of primary liver cancers, is refractory to conventional chemotherapy with very low survival rate. As obesity is a major risk factor for HCC, it is imperative to develop new therapeutic approaches. My laboratory has identified receptor protein tyrosine phosphatases (PTPs) as key regulators of glycolysis and lipogenesis, with PTPRK emerging as a particularly promising target. Mechanistically, PTPRK is selectively increased in tumorigenic hepatocytes, inactivating fructose-1,6-bisphosphatase 1 (FBP1) and promoting glycolysis. PTPRK-mediated glycolysis increases peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR)γ-dependent lipogenic signalling and HCC progression in obesity. REPRO-PTP aims to optimize and validate new PTPRK inhibitors that exhibit high selectivity, potency, and in vivo activity. By targeting both hepatic glycolysis and lipogenesis, these inhibitors have the unique potential to improve treatment outcomes for HCC in obese patients by reducing cancer progression and relapse risk. We will provide a robust pipeline for the broader development of PTPRK and additional PTP inhibitors for translational applicability, devise an intellectual property strategy, and perform a commercial feasibility analysis. The project represents a collaborative effort involving experts in oncology, biochemistry, and pharmacology, and is expected to yield novel insights into PTPs as drug targets in cancer and metabolic diseases. REPRO-PTP aims to pave the way for the development of innovative therapies that can improve the quality of life and survival rates for patients suffering from HCC and potentially other obesity-related hepatic complications.
Projet ERC : StreP (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Hasselt — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UHasselt
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 110000.0 €

CO2 neutral energy generation is needed for climate change. PV can solve a large portion of this need. In densely populated areas, the use of land is scarce and therefore PV integrated in the built and living environment is preferred to make double use of land area. Flexible PV sheets already exist, but the present PV sheets cannot be stretched or elongated like textile that is placed under stress. The existing PV sheets can be rolled and bended, but not elongated, which is important when the PV sheets would be integrated into e.g. the architectural textile. This project aims to solve this problem by making the interconnection between the solar cells stretchable. This would open many opportunities to integrate these PV foils in applications where the flexible sheets are placed under severe mechanical stress or tension. In this project we will use flexible CIGS PV cells, which are also used in the present flexible PV modules. To allow stretching of the foil under mechanical stress, it requires a special interconnection technology. A patent pending technology has been developed to create a series interconnection between the flexible solar cells, that at the same time can be stretched several millimeters, so that an elongation of 3 to 10% of the PV foil would become possible. This would be new and opens the possibility to integrate the PV foil in any tent-like structure. Applications we foresee are: - PV integrated in tents for refugee camps. Integration of the PV on the tents itself, will create immediately energy generation at the moment of setting up the tents. - Agricultural PV is a fast-expanding PV segment. For this application, the resistance to wind pressure is an important factor and stretchable PV would be a solution to overcome that problem. - Architectural textile is used for making domes to cover sport or other large infrastructure (with dimensions up to 600m x 400m). These large roof surfaces would be ideal to generate part of the CO2 neutral energy.
Projet ERC : PeptInsure (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Cambridge — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 65656.0 €

Food fraud and mislabeling undermine public trust in the food industry and regulatory bodies. The scale of these issues is heightened by the so-called Protein Gap. PeptInsure offers a new solution to authentication of protein in the food and feed industries by leveraging the strengths of ZooMS for peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) and the novel LAP-MALDI technology, enhancing the specificity, affordability, and efficacy of protein analysis. This unique combination, alongside advanced software tools, enables PeptInsure to transcend the limitations of existing methods, such as specificity issues, costliness, and the impact of processing on detectability, positioning it as a pioneering solution capable of redefining protein analysis standards. These factors combine to position PeptInsure as a pioneering approach that could redefine standards for protein analysis in food and feed, with implications for safety, quality, and consumer trust. While existing methods each contribute valuable tools for protein analysis in food and feed, they are often hampered by limitations related to specificity, cost, and the impact of processing on detectability. PeptInsure's innovative integration of technologies aims to overcome these challenges, offering a comprehensive, reliable, and cost-effective solution for protein authentication and quality assurance in the food industry. If successful, PeptInsure stands to offer groundbreaking innovations in the field of protein analysis, with far-reaching implications for food safety, quality assurance, and market integrity. However, the project's high-risk elements, including the integration of complex technologies, adaptation to diverse matrices, and the need for advanced data analysis approaches, pose significant challenges. Overcoming these challenges will require innovative solutions, interdisciplinary collaboration, and a commitment to research and development, underscoring the high-risk/high-gain nature of the PeptInsure project.
Projet ERC : IMBIBE PoC II (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Cambridge — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Organ on Chip (OoC) technology, which models human tissues in vitro, is poised to refactor the drug discovery pipeline and alleviate the financial burden with the added benefit of reducing/ refining animal experimentation. The advent of non-destructive, biosensing modalities has placed data-driven approaches to identifying new therapeutics within reach, where highly parallelized instances of human organ models can be mined for AI and ML-augmented discovery. During our ERC CoG grant, we developed a novel technology which combines these two frontiers; by fabricating porous scaffolds from conducting polymer hydrogels, we were able to culture 3D organotypic models of human epithelial tissues, while conducting highly sensitive, non-destructive electrochemical monitoring of the tissues. During our previous IMBIBE PoC grant, we showed that our technology was compatible with a fluidic platform produced by an industry partner. However, in doing so, we identified a major pain point in the OoC ecosystem: the step discontinuity in the level of complexity, both of the tissue model and the typical OoC form factor, is too great to allow for integration into current industry workflows. This barrier to adoption is crippling and needs to be addressed by harmonising platform form factor with industry standards. Here, we propose pivoting our current technology to meet this need – by radically altering our fabrication methodology, opting for hydrogel electrospinning, we can produce simplified OoC platforms, which represent the smallest possible adoption cost to our industry partners, while providing for highly scalable continuous monitoring of the tissues. Further, our proposal will facilitate the process of gradual evolution of tissue model and sensor complexity, without disrupting industrial workflow, to allow convergence between the state of the art in the pharmaceutical ecosystem and the bleeding edge technological advancements being made in the academic sector.
Projet ERC : IMPLS (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Nederlandse organisatie voor wetenschappelijk onderzoek — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : NWO
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

The solar cell industry already has an annual value of 200 billion US dollars and is expected to triple in the coming ten years. Within that period, an emerging solar cell material – halide perovskite – is projected to capture 20% of the market, by being used in combination with current market-leading silicon solar cells. While the efficiency of this emerging solar material is outstanding, ionic migration that occurs during solar cell operation leads to poor stability, which is the main factor limiting commercialization today. The current state-of-the-art techniques for measuring ionic migration require electrical contacts, cannot be used during the manufacturing process to understand which steps lead to instability, cannot be used for spatial mapping and provide no chemical information about the migrating ionic species. This means that such tools have limited utility in understanding and solving the stability problem. We have developed a purely optical technique for measuring ionic, chemical and defect processes in halide perovskite semiconductors – intensity modulated photoluminescence spectroscopy (IMPLS) – which overcomes all the limitations associated with state-of-the-art measurements. The goal of this ERC PoC project is to benchmark IMPLS against state-of-the-art techniques for measuring ion migration in halide perovskite materials and build prototypes of instruments that meet the market demand for understanding and solving the stability problem in halide perovskites. This will be done first in the research market, setting the stage for entering the much bigger development and manufacturing markets in the future.
Projet ERC : Soxradicate Relapse (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université d'Uppsala — Pays : Suède — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 40000.0 €

Emergence of therapy resistance is a major cause of death following conventional chemotherapy and radiation for children and adults with malignant brain tumors. It is imperative to find novel options to target therapy-resistant brain tumor populations to save lives. We propose a novel platform providing a prognostic tool and a suicide gene therapy tool using engineered viruses. It involves targeting freshly biopsied cells from brain tumor patients with our strategy in combination with standard therapy to predict risk of patients developing relapse and a gene therapy suicide tool to remove cells causing relapse. Previous suicide gene therapies have only used viruses hitting dividing tumor cells. Our strategy will use an enigneered virus targeting non-dividing tumor cells that we know escape standard therapy. After removing the tumor bulk using standard treatment, we propose to use our virus with a marker for diagnostic purposes or a with a suicide gene that will be activated by a prodrug to eradicate therapy-resistant cells. Prodrug administration before recurrence will eliminate relapsed cells once they start dividing and become dangerous.  The impact of our strategy will be high, providing health care professionals with a better tool to identify patients at high risk of developing recurrence. Such patients can receive a better, more tailored treatment that will not only increase their chance of survival but also reduce their time under hospital care and rehabilitation. We protected our strategy with a filed patent and assessed our regulatory needs. We completed a market analysis to evaluate market size and potential benefit for cancer patients. We have disclosed competitors but also potential collaborators that can cofinance and move our strategy forward to in vitro diagnostic device registration and initial clinical trials. In our proposal we will apply for funding covering lab work to test efficacy and safety, help with registration and negotitation strategies.
Projet ERC : MELAB (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Université de Cambridge — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Inter-individual variation in cancer therapy responses is significant, with a substantial fraction of patients not responding to treatment. This exposes non-responders to harmful side effects without benefit and results in vast resources being spent on eventually ineffective treatments. A key factor behind this variability is differences in microbiome composition and metabolism. However, translating microbiome-cancer research into live bacterial therapies that modulate the microbiome is challenging due to its complexity and heterogeneity. This project addresses this challenge using safe, robust, metabolically enhanced lactic acid bacteria capable of delivering therapy-boosting metabolites in the gut. We focus on metabolites naturally produced by gut bacteria that have been shown to enhance the efficacy of chemotherapy. The engineered bacteria will function as live biotherapeutics, ensuring the targeted delivery of metabolites directly in the gut and thus achieving physiologically beneficial pharmacokinetics. Our approach is distinct from other microbiome therapies due to its clear mechanism of action and the use of a unique platform developed in the ERC project ModEM. It enables rapid metabolic enhancement without genetic engineering, thereby reducing regulatory hurdles and accelerating market entry. Overall, the MELAB project aims to translate core findings from the ModEM project into a novel therapeutic adjuvant with the potential to benefit cancer patients by increasing therapy response rates.

Mots-clés : microbiome,cancer,live biotherapeutics