Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
SEAMLESS DIGITAL INTEGRATION IN STEEL VALUE CHAIN FOR HIGH QUALITY FINAL PRODUCTS (SMARTChain)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness
Programme: Digital, Industry and Space
Theme: Industry
Destination: Climate neutral, Circular and Digitised Production
Action type: Innovation actions
Partnership: Clean Steel (co-programmed)
Countries involved: Italy,Greece,Lithuania,Spain,Slovenia,Netherlands,Türkiye
Call: Digital transformation and ensuring a better use of industrial data, which can optimise steel supply chains (Clean Steel Partnership) (IA) (HORIZON-CL4-2024-TWIN-TRANSITION-01, 2024)
Start date: 2024-10-01
End date: 2027-09-30
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 6453527.29
EU funding (EUR): 4997488.8
Participants: 15
Project status: SIGNED

The steel industry represents an important economic pillar of the European economy, but also 4% of all EU CO2 emissions. This reduction requires fundamental, rapid and large-scale systemic transformations to fully decarbonise the global steel industry system. Thanks to digital technologies applied in steel production it will be possible to optimise processes, reduce energy consumption and improve the quality of the final products, nonetheless the digital transition is still in progress and technological solutions are still requested to make a better use of industrial data. As acknowledged by the CSP and SRIA, digitalisation is a key enabler for a sustainable and competitive EU Steel Industry. In this framework, SMARTChain aims at improving digitalisation in steel industry to go a step further in process control and optimisation, realising a horizontal integration in the steel value chain, through secure data sharing, promoting the interoperability of systems and tools to aim better quality of final and intermediate products, while optimising energy consumption and consequently reducing CO2 emissions, contributing to the achievement of the EU climate neutrality goal. Thus, the project will focus on the connection between steelmakers and steel users enabling an exchange of information devoted to the optimisation of the quality of final and intermediate products. Finally, steelmaking operators will be involved in the implementation of digital technologies through training programs that will allow to create a workforce that will make advantage of digital transformation. To reach these objectives a digital platforms for steelmakers and steel users will be developed for the data gathering from all the steps of the production process and to connect the quality of final products with material properties. Moreover, an Industrial Data Space and a Digital Material Passport will developed for secure data exchange and to guarantee the traceability of material information.

Keywords: steel industry,digital technologies,process optimisation,ai,digital platform
Epistemology of In Vitro Models in Comparative Biology (EpiVitro)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Postdoctoral Fellowships
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Panel: Social Sciences and Humanities
Countries involved: Denmark
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2024 (HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01, 2024)
Start date: 2025-09-01
End date: 2027-08-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 247553.28
EU funding (EUR): 247553.28
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

In vitro models—cells that are cultured outside the body, and studied as models of living organs or organisms—have been increasing their importance in a wide range of fields in biology and medicine. Yet they involve epistemic problems. How can simplified and experimentally modified cell culture systems serve as reliable models of living organs and organisms? How do they function in broader inferential practices in different contexts? How do experts of different fields, who have different aims and values, interact and collaborate to generate, study, and use in vitro models? This project will assess the prospects and limitations of in vitro models in comparative biology through answering the above questions. It will integrate philosophical analysis and empirical qualitative methods to examine a case study: in vitro comparative primatology. This is a rapidly developing interdisciplinary area of research, which studies different primate species by applying advance in vitro technology to serve research into human evolution, veterinary science, conservation, etc. Using this case study, this project will generate novel insights into how various experimental modifications, inferential practices, and social/institutional factors facilitate and/or constrain representational function of scientific models. This project will benefit from and contribute to the existing expertise at the Section for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Copenhagen, which hosts and participates in research projects that examine epistemic and social implications of specific practices of biomedical research, including in vitro models by combining philosophical analysis and qualitative methods.

Keywords: philosophy of science in practice philosophy of biology philosophy of developmental biology
Controlling the Surface Chemistry of Intermetallic Compounds for Nanoscale Metal Interconnects (CRIME)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Postdoctoral Fellowships
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Panel: Chemistry
Countries involved: Belgium
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2023 (HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01, 2023)
Start date: 2025-01-01
End date: 2026-12-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 191760.0
EU funding (EUR): 191760.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Interconnects impose major limits on the performance on integrated circuits during the exponential reduction of feature size of microchips. The semiconductor industry faces challenges in the metallization of interconnects below the 10 nm half pitch and is looking to alternative metallization schemes to replace copper, the traditional choice for the last 20 years, which no longer meet the conductivity requirements at decreasing length scales. Binary metals such as nickel-aluminium (NiAl) have been identified as a promising candidate that performs well with respect to resistivity at critical dimensions (sub-10 nm) to replace copper. However, there are several challenges associated with the instability of these materials regarding surface oxidation, leading to performance degradation. The objective of CRIME is the in-situ removal of the surface oxide and in-situ passivation of binary intermetallic compounds to prevent surface oxidation at the sub-10 nm half pitch for interconnect applications. To meet the future size requirements of interconnects, the downscaling of the cleaning and passivation processes from blankets to sub-10 nm half-pitch and the formation of patterned lines, with the aim of sub-7 nm half-pitch, will be performed. This will be achieved through an interdisciplinary approach that combines material science, chemistry, chemical engineering, nanoelectronics, and physics, to test different metal oxide removal and surface cleaning chemistries in combination with organic and inorganic passivation layers in-situ to overcome the formation of an oxide top layer. The passivation layers will be deposited in the liquid and vapour phase and various analytic techniques will be used to elucidate the surface chemistry and surface reaction mechanisms. CRIME goes beyond the state-of-the-art as the cleaning and passivating process and the downscaling of these processes on NiAl at the nanoscale and for advanced microelectronics nodes has not been previously demonstrated

Keywords: interconnects,intermetallic films,passivating layers,metallisation,binary metals,patterning,vapour phase deposition,liquid phase deposition,back end of line beol,nanopatterning
Mid-blastula transition in mammalian embryos (Mammalian MBT)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Postdoctoral Fellowships
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Panel: Life Sciences
Countries involved: Netherlands
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2023 (HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01, 2023)
Start date: 2025-07-01
End date: 2027-06-30
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 187624.32
EU funding (EUR): 187624.32
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Early animal embryos undergo a profound reprogramming of cell behaviour at the blastula stage in a major developmental transition known as the mid-blastula transition (MBT). Earlier studies demonstrated that MBT is an essential transition for embryonic development across various species, involving simultaneous changes in key cellular activities: activation of zygotic genome transcription (ZGA), cell cycle elongation, loss of division synchrony, and onset of cell motility. In contrast, little is known for mammalian embryos, which are often viewed as not having an MBT because of their slow initial cell cycle and early ZGA. However, MBT also exhibits a switch in the cell growth mode from reductive cleavage divisions to proliferative growth, and our recent findings suggest that this switch occurs at the blastocyst stage in mouse embryos. This project aims to identify the mammalian MBT, define its fundamental features and investigate the mechanisms that control its timing. Employing light-sheet microscopy to image mouse embryos at high spatiotemporal resolution, automatic cell segmentation and single-cell tracking, I will quantitatively characterise the cell volume dynamics in early embryogenesis. This will allow me to identify the transition from cleavage to proliferative growth and use this time reference to characterise novel MBT features. Specifically, I will focus on 18 hours within the blastocysts stage to test the hypothesis that mammalian MBT entails changes in cell fate, metabolism, spindle assembly and/or cell cycle control. Through temporally controlled perturbations I will determine if there is a causal link between these changes and identify the upstream regulator, the trigger for the mammalian MBT, as well as the mechanism by which the MBT timing is controlled. The identification and characterisation of mammalian MBT may provide a new definition and mechanism regulating this key transition in animal development.

Keywords: mid blastula transition cleavage cell growth cell cycle dynamics quantitative cell biology
General Lattice-Based Zero-Knowledge (GLAZE)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Computer Science and Informatics
Panel description: Informatics and information systems, computer science, scientific computing, intelligent systems
Countries involved: Switzerland
Call: ERC STARTING GRANTS (ERC-2025-STG, 2025)
Start date: 2026-01-01
End date: 2030-12-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1499992.0
EU funding (EUR): 1499992.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Zero-knowledge proof systems are an extremely versatile tool for the construction of advanced cryptographic protocols and especially privacy-preserving protocols. Their importance will increase in the expected post-quantum world where quantum computers break classical cryptography. Unfortunately, for many applications and despite enormous research efforts, state-of-the-art quantum-safe proof systems of PCP type do not yet offer the necessary performance required in practice. The time needed to compute a proof is often too long and the proof size too big. An important such application that shall serve as a guiding principle in this project are privacy-preserving protocols constructed on top of standard (random-oracle) schemes. In recent research a promising new family of proof systems has emerged that is based on lattice cryptography. Especially their computational performance and proof sizes warrant more research into them. But lattice-based proof systems do not currently match the functionality of the PCP-type ones and can not be used for proving general computation. The central objective of GLAZE is to research ways to bring the functionality of lattice-based proof systems to the state of PCP-type ones, and then work on improving their performance and proof sizes to levels that are orders of magnitude better than the state of the art, enabling applications that are completely beyond the reach of practicality at the moment. Concretely, this project would ideally result in lattice-based proof systems able to prove a standard post-quantum signature such as Falcon with its long unstructured full-domain hash in under 100 milliseconds prover time and 10 Kilobytes proof size on a mobile processor.

Keywords: post quantum,lattices,zero knowledge,crypto implementations
An injectable and programmable drug-eluting embolic device (EmboPore)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Proof of concept grants
Action type: ERC actions
Countries involved: Israel
Call: ERC PROOF OF CONCEPT GRANTS2 (ERC-2022-POC2, 2022)
Start date: 2023-06-01
End date: 2024-11-30
Duration (months): 18.0
Total project cost (EUR): 150000.0
EU funding (EUR): 150000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

This project aims to develop a novel platform for drug delivery and treatment for liver cancers. A first in its kind two-step acting platform is described in detail depicting an early step of drug elusion to viable tissue (in contrast to acute embolism) followed by a later stage of vessel blockage to induce tissue necrosis is introduced here. Inspired by the coronary drug eluting stent concept we will introduce a novel porous degradable bead referred as EmboPore used as “mini-stents” that can elute drugs for predetermined time and collapse at the end of drug treatment period to embolize the tissue. This two-step concept ensures that a proper and massive drug perfusion will be performed prior to occlusion of the blood vessel that is used to induce tumor necrosis. Another important advantage of the gradual blockage is in reduction of the secreted adverse pro-cancer stress signals that occurs in the acute embolism procedure. The product is designed as biodegradable and injectable to fit the current catheters as being used in the standard clinical procedures. Such product is expected to substantially improve the relatively modest clinical outcomes of embolic devices and possibly open new indications such as metastatic liver diseases, gastrointestinal disease and more.
Getting SYMmetric CryPtography Out of its Comfort ZONe (SYMPZON)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Computer Science and Informatics
Panel description: Informatics and information systems, computer science, scientific computing, intelligent systems
Countries involved: Netherlands
Call: ERC STARTING GRANTS (ERC-2024-STG, 2024)
Start date: 2025-02-01
End date: 2030-01-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1499309.0
EU funding (EUR): 1499309.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Our lives are profoundly affected by the digitization of data, and the amount of sensitive data that is shared on cloud storage grows considerably every day. Whenever sensitive data is collected, manipulated, exchanged, analyzed, and retained, symmetric cryptography is used. The most commonly used and famous symmetric cryptography algorithms are AES and Keccak/SHA-3. Due to their importance, the entire research community focuses its attention on such schemes, with the result that the great majority of the symmetric primitives recently published resemble them. While positive at first glance, the limits of this approach and of the current state of the art are appearing in several contexts. First, the similarity of such schemes caused a performance flatness, with no substantial improvement recently achieved. Next, our understanding of their security has not fundamentally improved in the course of the last years, since their security arguments are still based on unverified and often false assumptions. Finally, and more importantly, the current bit-oriented schemes are *not* suitable for rising applications of practical importance such as Format Preserving Encryption, Multi-Party Computation, Fully Homomorphic Encryption, and Zero-Knowledge, which naturally operate over prime fields and/or integer rings. The only way we can overcome these fundamental problems is by considering non-standard innovative approaches for designing secure and efficient symmetric primitives. Within the SYMPZON project, I plan to reshape the whole process of designing symmetric primitives by - developing design strategies for defeating attacks against symmetric primitives that mainly operate over integer rings; - constructing new cryptographic components over integer rings that admit an efficient bit-representation. This will lead to revolutionary symmetric primitives dedicated to targeting the rising number of applications operating over rings, with unprecedent security arguments and performances.

Keywords: symmetric cryptography cryptanalysis format preserving encryption mpc fhe zk friendly symmetric schemes
UniqueAI - revolutionising automotive safety with an AI-powered advanced radar testing simulation solution (UNIQUEAI)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Innovative Europe
Programme: The European Innovation Council (EIC)
Theme: EIC Accelerator
Destination: Other destinations
Action type: EIC actions
Countries involved: Sweden
Call: EIC Accelerator 2024 - Short application (HORIZON-EIC-2024-ACCELERATOR-01, 2024)
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2500000.0
EU funding (EUR): 2500000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

In the UniqueAI project, Uniquesec, a leading innovator in radar testing solutions, will address the need for advanced, efficient, and scalable radar testing in the automotive industry. Current methods, including extensive road tests and time-domain in-lab testing, are costly, time-consuming, and environmentally unfriendly. They struggle with modern radar system complexities and fail to accurately simulate real-world conditions, particularly for advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving technologies. UniqueAI will use generative AI to revolutionize radar testing with an advanced radar target simulation (RTS) system. Building on the ASGARD platform, UniqueAI will automate signal generation, reducing adaptation time for new radars from months to days and will enhance testing accuracy, scalability, and efficiency. UniqueAI will stand out by using AI and operating in the frequency domain, offering superior resolution and adaptability compared to time-domain methods. It will support MIMO radars, imaging radars, interference and micro-Doppler emulation, and simulate targets at distances as short as 0.5 meters, providing unmatched comprehensive testing capabilities. The EIC Accelerator project aims to advance UniqueAI from TRL 5 by: creating an RF signal dataset, designing and developing the model, integrating the system and developing the prototype, demonstrating and validating the system, scaling up for commercial use. EIC funding will accelerate UniqueAI's development, enabling market launch by 2027 and expanding Uniquesec's market presence, driving significant revenue growth from 2.8 MEUR in 2024 to 25.5 MEUR in 2029, as well as support job creation, increasing the workforce to 21 FTEs by 2029. UniqueAI aligns with key EU policies, contributing to the Green Deal by reducing CO2 emissions and promoting sustainable mobility. It supports the EU’s Digital Strategy and Vision Zero initiative by enhancing digital infrastructure and vehicle safety.

Keywords: generative ai automotive radar testing radar target simulation rts adas development autonomous driving frequency domain testing solutions sensor calibration signal processing algorithms
Development and clinical validation of AMP101 (Methotrexate Forte) to boost the efficacy of Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) treatments (AMP101)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Innovative Europe
Programme: The European Innovation Council (EIC)
Theme: EIC Accelerator
Destination: Other destinations
Action type: EIC actions
Countries involved: Netherlands
Call: EIC Accelerator 2024 - Short application (HORIZON-EIC-2024-ACCELERATOR-01, 2024)
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 3600000.0
EU funding (EUR): 3600000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Autoimmune disorders affect about 1 in 10 people, with a higher prevalence in women, and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a major concern, impacting 1% of the population. Most RA patients (88%) are treated with Disease-Modifying Antirheumatic Drugs (DMARDs), including methotrexate (MTX), the global gold standard for RA treatment. However, MTX’s efficacy is limited, with only 1 in 3 patients achieving disease remission, leading to prolonged suffering, higher treatment costs, and loss of productivity. Amplio Pharma BV's Methotrexate Forte addresses this problem with an innovative solution. Methotrexate Forte combines low-dose MTX with a pharmacokinetic (PK) enhancer, novobiocin, to improve MTX retention in pro-inflammatory cells. Novobiocin, a natural fermentation product, inhibits the ABCG2 proteins that expel MTX from cells, thus enhancing its intracellular activity and efficacy. This approach aims to double the remission rate, reduce the time to remission, and decrease the required dose of MTX, potentially minimizing side effects and improving patient outcomes. Methotrexate Forte's value proposition includes enhanced treatment response, reduced side effects, and significant healthcare cost savings. By improving MTX’s clinical efficacy, this novel drug product aims to reduce the need for expensive add-on biologics and JAK inhibitors, which currently cost between €7,000 and €25,000 per patient annually. This cost reduction is substantial given that 65-70% of RA patients require these additional treatments. Moreover, Methotrexate Forte promises improved quality of life by better managing RA symptoms, thus enabling patients to lead more active and fulfilling lives. In the planned EIC project, the company aims to optimize the manufacturing process and GMP production of Methotrexate Forte, validating the PK enhancer’s efficacy through preclinical and clinical studies, and engaging in market validation and commercial scaling through strategic partnerships.

Keywords: personalised treatment,immunology,healthcare system,patient care