Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Deciphering how microbiota modulate anti-tumor immune responses in checkpoint therapy (MIMIC)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Individual Fellowships (IF)-Standard European Fellowships
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Panel: Life Sciences
Countries involved: France
Call: Individual Fellowships (H2020-MSCA-IF-2018, 2018)
Start date: 2020-04-01
End date: 2022-03-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 184707.84
EU funding (EUR): 184707.84
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Microbiota has a major impact on anti-tumor immune responses and efficacy of anticancer treatments. These effects are thought to be mediated by modulation of tumor-infiltrating myeloid cells. These include immunosuppressive macrophages that differentiate from inflammatory monocytes recruited to the tumor. However, what microbiota-derived products are required for efficient anti-tumoral responses is still unclear. We have recently identified the Aryl Hydrocarbon Receptor (AhR) as a key suppressor of monocyte-to-macrophage differentiation. AhR is a ligand-activated transcription factor sensing metabolites derived mainly from dietary intake and microbiota metabolism. Based on our previous work, we hypothesize that AhR is involved in the modulation of anti-tumoral responses by the microbiota, via the regulation of immune cells differentiation or function. The objective of the project is to address whether AhR ligands mediate the impact of microbiota on anti-tumor responses in anti-checkpoint therapy and to determine the cellular mechanisms involved. To address it, we will analyse anti-tumor immune responses in groups of mice with normal or altered microbiota, treated or not with anticheckpoint therapy, fed with a control diet or supplemented for AhR ligands. We will combine two complimentary approaches, employing antibiotics to deplete the microbiota or using germfree mice. The efficacy of immunotherapies using checkpoint inhibitors is greatly reduced in patients who receive antibiotics. This is a major issue as antibiotics are commonly prescribed to prevent or treat infections in cancer patients, who may be vulnerable. This research project will provide critical novel insight into the complex interplay between microbiota and anti-tumor immune responses. Results from this project will be instrumental in designing novel strategies for improving anti-tumoral immunotherapies.

Keywords: microbiota,immunotherapy,onco immunology,tumor,aryl hydrocarbon receptor
Cliodynamic archaeology: Computational approaches to Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic archaeology and climate change (CLIOARCH)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: The study of the human past
Panel description: Archaeology, history and memory
Countries involved: Denmark
Call: ERC Consolidator Grant (ERC-2018-COG, 2018)
Start date: 2019-09-01
End date: 2025-08-31
Duration (months): 72.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1907638.0
EU funding (EUR): 1907638.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Late Pleistocene/early Holocene Europe is said to be the ideal laboratory for the investigation of human responses to rapidly changing climates and environments, migration and adaptation. Yet, pinpointing precisely how and why contemporaneous Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic (15,000-11,000 years BP) foragers migrated, and which environmental or other factors they adapted to – or failed to – has remained remarkably elusive. At the core of ClioArch is the radical but, in light of research-historical insights, necessary hypothesis that the current archaeological cultural taxonomy for this iconic period of European prehistory is epistemologically flawed and that operationalisations and interpretations based on this traditional taxonomy – especially those that seek to relate observed changes in material culture and land-use to contemporaneous climatic and environmental changes – are therefore problematic. Hence, novel approaches to crafting the taxonomic building blocks are required, as are novel analyses of human|environment relations in this period. ClioArch’s premier ambition is to provide operational cultural taxonomies for the Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic of Europe and to couple these with interdisciplinary cultural evolutionary, quantitative ecological methods and field archaeological investigations beyond the state-of-the-art, so as to better capture such adaptations – almost certainly with major implications for the standard culture-historical narrative relating to this period. In so doing, the project will pioneer a fully transparent and replicable – and eminently transferable – methodology for the study of the impacts of climate change and extreme environmental events in deep history. In turn, such a quantitative understanding of past adaptive dynamics will position archaeology more centrally in contemporary debates about climate change, environmental catastrophe and their cultural dimensions.
An Industrial Symbiosis Incubator for Maximizing Waste Heat/Cold Efficiency in Industrial Parks and Districts (INCUBIS)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Societal Challenges
Programme: Secure, clean and efficient energy
Theme: Reducing energy consumption and carbon foorpint by smart and sustainable use
Action type: Coordination and support actions
Countries involved: Germany,Spain,Norway,Switzerland,Poland,United Kingdom,United Kingdom,United Kingdom
Call: Business case for industrial waste heat/cold recovery (H2020-LC-SC3-EE-2019, 2019)
Start date: 2020-05-01
End date: 2023-04-30
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2049875.0
EU funding (EUR): 1999875.0
Participants: 11
Project status: SIGNED

EU is currently responsible for 11.6% of the world's final energy consumption (9425 Mtoe in 2014) and for 10.8% of the world's final CO2 emissions (33.3 GtCO2 in 2014) with Industry accounting for 25.9% of the energy consumption and for 47.7% of the final CO2 emissions. Energy in industry is mostly used for process heating and cooling, which represents about 63% of the total industry final energy demand. A rather significant theoretical waste heat potential, accounting to 370.41 TWh (Waste heat) per year, has been estimated in the European industry. Energy Intensive Industries (EEIs) are unsurprisingly the top heat emitters. On the other hand, it is estimated that at least 50-70% of EU households could be served more cheaply by thermal infrastructure through district heating networks. District heating currently provides only 8% of the heating demand in Europe. There is therefore an opportunity for increasing energy efficiency growth rates and contributing significantly to the decarbonization targets of European Industry by using the large underutilized energy resources found throughout European EEIs to substitute conventional heat sources in the European industrial and urban sector. The overall objective of INCUBIS is: To help decarbonise European industry by 2050 by unlocking the market potential of ENERGY SYMBIOSIS through developing and deploying five (5) Energy Symbiosis Incubators across Europe, complemented by a digital Cloud Incubator, thus enabling the utilization of waste energy from EEIs. In doing so INCUBIS will achieve total energy savings of 200GWh/year, trigger €6 Million of investments in sustainable energy, generate benefits of €4 Million, achieve GHG reduction of 55k tCO2-eq/year, and convince 1450 business over 40 industrial parks to commit to energy cooperation. To achieve this INCUBIS has put together a prestigious consortium of 8 partners including 5 SMEs that span 6 European countries and will work for the duration of 36 months.

Keywords: industrial symbiosis,energy cooperation,energy efficiency,eco industrial parks,waste heat,excess heat,residual heat,energy services
Planning the Articulation of Spoken Utterances (PlanArt)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Advanced grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Panel description: Cognitive science, psychology, linguistics, theoretical philosophy
Countries involved: Germany,Finland,United States,United Kingdom,United Kingdom
Call: ERC ADVANCED GRANT (ERC-2020-ADG, 2020)
Start date: 2022-01-01
End date: 2026-12-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2375025.0
EU funding (EUR): 2134545.0
Participants: 5
Project status: SIGNED

I address major controversies relating to the basic underpinnings of the human speech production system. These concern a) the nature of the mental representations of speech sounds (symbolic vs. spatiotemporal; phonemic vs. non-phonemic gestural), b) the goals of movement (articulatory vs. explicitly acoustic; with emergent vs. explicit surface durations), and c) the processes for planning and generating speech articulations (oscillator-based mechanisms vs. Optimal Control Theory and Lee’s Tau theory). PlanArt will offer the first systematic attempt to determine which theoretical assumptions about each of these three fundamental components are required to provide an adequate account of human speech production behaviour. This ambitious task requires a cutting-edge two-pronged approach. First, through novel experiments I will test predictions of theoretical alternatives for types of phonological representations, output goals, and planning processes. Many of these experiments are inspired by theory and techniques in the non-speech motor literature, which are new to the field of speech production. In the second prong of my research, I will provide a comparison of the articulatory outputs of computational models based on particular sets of core theoretical assumptions. This second, modelling prong will include the development of a flexible, modular platform allowing for parallel implementation, testing, and comparison of competing theoretical assumptions in terms of model outputs, as well as the development of a computational implementation of a new approach, proposed by team members Turk & Shattuck-Hufnagel (2020a) to address shortcomings in the literature. Taken together, this work will provide converging evidence for the nature of the bedrock elements and processes of speech production and will deliver answers to longstanding questions in phonology and phonetics about the way we plan the pronunciations of words in different contexts.

Keywords: speech planning,speech articulation,phonology,phonetics
Identifying pathways of cellular nanoparticle uptake and early processing for novel nanomedicine applications (NanoPaths)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases
Panel description: Medical technologies and tools for prevention, diagnosis and treatment of human diseases, therapeutic approaches and interventions, pharmacology, preventative medicine, epidemiology and public health, digital medicine
Countries involved: Netherlands
Call: ERC Starting Grant (ERC-2014-STG, 2014)
Start date: 2015-07-01
End date: 2021-04-30
Duration (months): 70.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1498746.25
EU funding (EUR): 1498746.25
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Nanotechnology applied to medicine has opened tremendous opportunities for the design of devices capable of targeting cancer and other diseases, and to deliver therapies selectively to locations where drugs currently can scarcely arrive. Translation of nanomedicines to the clinic however still remains challenging and the mechanistic details of the pathways used by cells to internalize and process man-made nanoparticles are still poorly understood. NanoPaths aims to understand how nanoparticles are processed by cells and in particular (1) to disentangle the mechanisms they use to enter cells, and (2) discover whether highly curved nanosized objects can assist cell membrane curvature, thus play an active role in their internalization; (3) to isolate the structures in which nanoparticles are internalized, in order to understand early sorting by cells, and further characterise the machinery for internalization; and finally (4) to define heterogeneity in cell response to nanoparticles in all of these aspects due to population context (i.e. cell cycle, local cell density) and identify eventual rare-cell behaviours. Several methods to ensure quantitative nanoparticle-cell interaction studies and discriminate cell subpopulations have already been developed in my previous work and now allow me to ask these questions. These methods will be combined with novel approaches applied for the first time in this arena, such as the use of full genome screens to study uptake; single molecule fluorescence methods to understand the role of nanoparticle curvature; novel cell fractionation methods coupled to quantitative proteomics to identify key proteins involved in uptake and early sorting; individual cell analysis to address heterogeneity in cell response to nanoparticles and study rare cells of interest. By disentangling the pathways involved in nanoparticle uptake and early sorting, the knowledge gained with NanoPaths will allow guiding the design of successful nanomedicines.

Keywords: nanoparticles,nanoparticle cell interactions,nanomedicine,nanosafety,nanoparticle uptake
Protein Nanosheet-Stabilised Emulsions for Next Generation Biomanufacturing (ProBioFac)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Proof of concept grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Panel description: New materials and new synthetic approaches, structure-properties relations, solid state chemistry, molecular architecture, organic chemistry
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call: Call for proposals for ERC Proof of Concept Grant (ERC-2020-PoC, 2020)
Start date: 2021-03-01
End date: 2022-08-31
Duration (months): 18.0
Total project cost (EUR): 150000.0
EU funding (EUR): 150000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The large scale expansion of adherent cells, which underpins the production of stem cells for regenerative medicine and the manufacturing of complex biotherapeutics (e.g. exosomes and vaccines) remains challenging and a key hurdle to the accessibility of associated therapies. Indeed, the expansion of adherent stem cells and adherent cell lines for bioproduction relies on culture on solid microcarriers that remain difficult to process and significantly add to costs. Cell adhesion to solid substrates and associated mechanotransduction is thought to be essential to mediate key processes regulating the production of biotherapeutics, such as exosome secretion and protein glycosylation. However, we recently demonstrated that liquid substrates, such as emulsion microdroplets, can support cell adhesion and promote the retention of a normal adherent phenotype. We showed that this process is mediated by the self-assembly of mechanically strong protein nanosheets at corresponding liquid-liquid interfaces. This project will demonstrate the scale up of emulsion-based biomanufacturing platforms. We will scale up (L scale) bio-emulsions based on protein nanosheets that promote cell adhesion and display suitable interfacial mechanics, from affordable protein sources. We will demonstrate the compatibility of such systems with bioreactors routinely used in the field, for the scale up of adherent stem cells production, and that of adherent cell lines for biotherapeutics production (exosomes and vaccines). We will establish further IP and a commercialisation strategy with identified partners to translate our technology in the field of biomanufacturing. We propose that bio-emulsions for the culture of adherent cells will bring a step change to the field of biomanufacturing, enabling to borrow concepts and processes from the field of chemical engineering, in which biphasic liquid-liquid systems and emulsions have revolutionised the production of fine chemicals, drugs and nanomaterials.

Keywords: biomanufacturing,stem cells,biotherapeutics,biotechnology,emulsion
Quantum Information Access and Retrieval Theory (QUARTZ)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Innovative Training Networks (ITN)-European Training Networks
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Panel: Information Science and Engineering
Countries involved: Germany,Australia,Germany,Spain,Italy,Belgium,Sweden,China,Denmark,United Kingdom,United Kingdom,United Kingdom
Call: Innovative Training Networks (H2020-MSCA-ITN-2016, 2016)
Start date: 2017-01-01
End date: 2020-12-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 3461495.04
EU funding (EUR): 3461495.04
Participants: 13
Project status: CLOSED

Quantum Information Access and Retrieval Theory We aim to establish an European Training Network (ETN) on QUantum information Access and Retrieval Theory (QUARTZ). Towards a new approach to Information Access and Retrieval (IAR) addressing the challenges of the dynamic and multimodal nature of the data and user interaction context, QUARTZ aims to educate its Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) to adopt a novel theoretically and empirically motivated approach to IAR based on the quantum mechanical framework that gives up the notions of unimodal features and classical ranking models disconnected from context. Each ESR will be aware that the current state of the art of IAR is not sufficient to address the challenges of a dynamic, adaptive and context-aware user-machine interaction and to make a major breakthrough in the overall effectiveness of retrieval systems, and that a genuine theoretical breakthrough is on the contrary necessary. We believe that this breakthrough can be provided by quantum theory which can integrate abstract vector spaces, probability spaces and logic in a single theoretical framework which extend and generalize the classical vector, probability and logic spaces utilised in IAR. QUARTZ will consist of training activities and ESR research projects which investigate theoretical issues and evaluate methods and prototypes for adaptive IAR systems managing large data collections and meeting the end user's information needs in a dynamic context.

Keywords: information retrieval,search engines
High speed and high torque electric transaxle enabling unprecedented use in agricultural applications (TX3)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Societal Challenges
Programme: Smart, green and integrated transport
Action type: SME instrument
Countries involved: Italy
Call: Small business innovation research for Transport and Smart Cities Mobility (H2020-SMEINST-1-2016-2017, 2017)
Start date: 2017-05-01
End date: 2017-08-31
Duration (months): 4.0
Total project cost (EUR): 71429.0
EU funding (EUR): 50000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The world of agricultural equipment continues to evolve in order to adapt to the needs of the sector, shifting to the use of small and efficient electric vehicles (EVs), which are more suited for compact dimensions and high performance. Such is the requirement in farms, nurseries, greenhouses and vineyards, where movement space for vehicles is confined, the crop sensitive to green-house emissions and high towing capacity is necessary. The most important component to contribute to torque and speed is the transmission system (transaxle). Current transaxles fitted on electric vehicles are less efficient, have a cumbersome design, consume more electrical energy, have reduced battery operational time and are more expensive, thereby costing farmers up to 50% more in operational expenses. TX3 aims at realizing an efficient "Third Generation Transmission Axle" presenting flexibility in torque and speed and a compact design to suit the needs of the sector. We will combine the best technologies in mechanical gear ratios, mechanical differential locking and transaxle modularisation, to produce a novel design that will completely revolutionise transaxles for the agricultural electric vehicle sector. The high efficiency of the transmission will allow for enhanced vehicle autonomy with higher load capacity and longer battery life expectancy on a single charge. The application of TX3 is expected to have ripple benefits across Europe and globally, maximising the productive running time, thereby increasing productivity for farmers. We will utilize our well established commercialization channels, which include our presence in 40 countries across 5 continents, to break onto the international markets, starting with Italy, Germany and France. In 2014, the agricultural machinery industry posted a total turnover of €27 billion out of an estimated total global market value of €160 billion in 2016.

Keywords: transmission,transaxle,electrical vehicle,agriculture,high efficiency,modularisation,autonomy
Combined Catalysis: Enhancing Asymmetric Synthesis (CombiCat)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Individual Fellowships (IF)-Standard European Fellowships
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Panel: Chemistry
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF-EF) (H2020-MSCA-IF-2015, 2015)
Start date: 2016-10-01
End date: 2018-09-30
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 183454.8
EU funding (EUR): 183454.8
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The stereoselective synthesis of small organic molecules depends on robust catalytic methods. Despite many advances in enantioselective synthesis, an unsolved challenge in catalysis is the translation of enantioselective catalytic reactions to diastereoselective reactions – where a chiral catalyst controls the outcome of reaction of a chiral substrate. In this proposal, we seek to investigate this 'double stereodifferentiation' in various organocatalytic reactions, and in transition metal-catalyzed cycloisomerization, two fields which take advantage of the expertise of the host group and the experienced researcher. We further aim to explore the union of these two fields using 'Combined catalysis' – specifically, in dual catalytic processes through which we seek to improve stereoselective syntheses of small organic molecules attractive to the pharmaceutical industry. The culmination of the project will be cascade dual catalytic processes, where the organocatalyst serves to activate the substrate towards metal-catalyzed cycloisomerization, and also to mediate a further asymmetric synthetic transformation. The successful completion of these goals will require the combined expertise of the two project partners: in metal catalysis (the host group) and organocatalysis (the ER), with the proposal being based on preliminary results in both areas.

Keywords: dual catalysis,organocatalysis,cycloisomerization,stereoselective synthesis