Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Stimulation Obtained by Ultrasound for NeuroDegeneration (SOUND) (SOUND)

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: Italy
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2022 (HORIZON-MSCA-2022-PF-01, 2022)
Start date: 2023-10-01
End date: 2026-03-31
Duration (months): 30.0
Total project cost (EUR): 174928.08
EU funding (EUR): 174928.08
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Neurodegeneration (ND) is a pathological process characterized by a progressive loss of structure and activity in neurons of specific brain areas, causing cognitive, sensory, and motor impairment until compromising even basic actions such as breathing and heart functioning. The condition affects over 100 million people globally, and it is estimated that ND incidence will constantly increase in the next decades, because of the increasing ageing of the European population and environmental factors. Nevertheless, the current treatments are not satisfactory, either because they become ineffective over time, e.g., pharmacological treatment, or because they are highly invasive, i.e. for deep brain stimulation or optogenetic approaches. In this landscape, nanotechnology is emerging as an innovative alternative for treating ND. Nanomaterials offer unique features that confer them the chance to activate degenerated neurons, therefore rescuing the network activity lost in ND. Here, we propose the preparation of a wireless, non-invasive, deep tissue penetrating nanotechnological platform for neuronal rescue upon ultrasound stimulation. We aim to develop a hybrid nanotool based on visible light-sensitive photovoltaic polymeric nanoparticles (that proved successful in rescuing several degenerated retina models in vivo) that will be conjugated to an ultrasound sensitizer, consisting of sonoluminescent molecules capable of transducing an ultrasound signal into a fluorescent emission that can excite the polymeric nanoparticles, ultimately eliciting a neuronal response. The construct will then be directed towards a specific neural population through a targeting moiety, consisting of an M13 bacteriophage nanoscaffold naturally possessing high targeting efficiency. The final nanotool will be tested in different 2D and 3D in vitro models to assess its biocompatibility, brain blood barrier permeability and neural rescuing efficiency.

Keywords: nanotechnology,nanoparticles,nanomaterials,ultrasound,photovoltaic materials,bio nano interactions,neurodegeneration
Autoxitus: Molecular mechanisms and non-cell autonomous signalling (autoXitus)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Molecules of Life: B iological  Mechanisms , Structures  and Functions
Panel description: For all organisms : Molecular biology , biochemistry, structural biology, molecular biophysics , synthetic and chemical biology, drug design, innovative methods and modelling
Countries involved: Germany
Call: ERC CONSOLIDATOR GRANTS (ERC-2023-COG, 2023)
Start date: 2024-10-01
End date: 2029-09-30
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2000000.0
EU funding (EUR): 2000000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Cells control their content by balancing its synthesis and degradation. Autophagy is a key degradation process capable of engulfing large fractions of cells, including organelles, into double-membrane vesicles called autophagosomes. These fuse with lysosomes causing degradation of their cargo. Secretory pathways, including secretory autophagy, offer an alternative option to remove unwanted materials from cells. However, mechanisms allowing the secretion of larger cellular components are still unknown. We identified a novel pathway, which we termed autoxitus – for self (auto) exit (xitus) – that leads to the secretion of autophagosomes. This proposal aims at defining the molecular mechanism and regulation of autoxitus. We will first study how specificity and decision-making between secretory autoxitus and degradative autophagy routes is achieved and whether there is cross-regulation. Autophagosomes on the autoxitus route can contain parts of the cytosol, but also large fragments of organelles, raising the question whether the secreted autoxitus vesicles signal to neighbouring cells in a non-cell autonomous manner. We aim to uncover the impact of these signalling processes to determine whether and how autoxitus helps to signal stress conditions or may even deliver material or organelles to other cells. Finally, the role of autoxitus in two (patho-)physiological conditions will be analysed. Since autophagic processes are key to viral particle release, we will study the contribution of autoxitus to the viral life cycle. Furthermore, we will investigate the role of autoxitus in the release of protein aggregates from cells and the resulting seeding propensity. This proposal will give ground-breaking insight into autoxitus, its molecular underpinnings and physiological consequences. AutoXitus will provide the framework for future integration into numerous cellular pathways.

Keywords: autophagy,protein homeostasis,secretion,extracellular vesicles,non cell autonomous signaling,protein aggregation,disease
Health Investments in Central and Eastern Europe (HICEE)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Innovative Europe
Programme: European innovation ecosystems
Theme: Elevating the scalability potential of European business
Destination: Elevating the scalability potential of European business
Action type: Coordination and support actions
Countries involved: Germany,Slovakia,Poland,Slovenia,Netherlands,Hungary,Belgium
Call: Expanding Investments Ecosystems (HORIZON-EIE-2022-SCALEUP-02, 2022)
Start date: 2023-11-15
End date: 2025-11-14
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1458515.54
EU funding (EUR): 1331851.25
Participants: 11
Project status: SIGNED

To address the low start-up survival rate and the lack of funding in “modest” and “moderate” innovation ecosystems within Europe – namely in Central and Eastern European countries - the consortium (led by EIT Health in collaboration with InnoStars, Civitta and other entities, as well as an advisory board including the EIF) will use their individual expertise to implement activities that build critical mass on both the investor and venture-building front. Given the investment challenges in early-stage ventures, the Project will seek to collaborate with local start-up support organizations to provide capacity building initiatives as well as to derisk local innovators to set the foundations for modest and moderate regions to become sustainable and competitive with more dynamic regions within the European ecosystem. The project will be structured around the impact pathway methodology (scoping, engaging and implementing). The specific objectives are: 1) to build robust and sustainable early-stage investment ecosystems and increase critical mass; 2) to increase venture investments through a) cultivating life sciences local investment and b) attracting foreign investors into the local innovation ecosystem; 3) to provide de-risking and investment readiness support for Dealflow exchange to increase syndication, and 4) to disseminate and implement project outcomes, create European foundation to address fragmentation in EU market and support cross-border investments In addition to said objectives, as well as the expected outcomes set out in the call, the Project will aim to impact wider European goals, including furthering the European Innovation Agenda, increasing investment competitiveness, start-up as wells as job creation, knowledge transfer, and widening European outreach. Furthermore, project results are expected to be applicable to other regions and non-health related industries and scope a Pan-European funding initiative for health tech ventures rich in assets.

Keywords: start up,scale up,women led companies,female investors,international investor syndicates,deal flow,business development,region development,ecosystem development
Craft Understanding, Education, Training, and Preservation for Posterity and Prosperity (Craeft)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness
Programme: Culture, creativity and inclusive society
Theme: Culture, creativity and inclusive society
Destination: Innovative Research on the European Cultural Heritage and the Cultural and Creative Industries
Action type: Research and Innovation actions
Countries involved: Greece,Italy,France,Switzerland,Denmark,Spain,Belgium
Call: Traditional crafts for the future: a new approach (HORIZON-CL2-2022-HERITAGE-01, 2022)
Start date: 2023-03-01
End date: 2026-02-28
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 3112106.25
EU funding (EUR): 3112106.0
Participants: 10
Project status: SIGNED

CRAEFT will deepen our understanding of making activities that include care, judgement, and dexterity standing on Anthropology, Knowledge Representation, Cognitive Science, Art History, Advanced Digitisation, Audiovisual & Haptic Immersivity, and Computational Intelligence to cover the multifaceted expression of crafts as living and developing heritage, as a sustainable source of income, and as the expression of the mind through imagery, technology, and sedimented knowledge. A generative approach will prove sufficiency for digital conservation, reenactable preservation, and scaling of approach for the full range of materials and techniques. CRAEFT will catalyse craft education and training with intuitive digital aids, telecommunications, craft-specific simulators, advanced immersivity, and high-end digitisation, to widen access, economise learning, increase exercisability, and relax remoteness constraints in craft learning. The integration of haptics intelligence haptics in digital design connects tacit knowledge in computer-aided craft-specific design tools. Workflow simulation will support experimental archaeology for the recovery of lost techniques. The analytic workflow analysis leads to digital fabrication opportunities for menial tasks, material savings and reuse, and reduction of energy consumption. Digital dimensions attached to individual works of craft will enable certification and attachment of digital content, but also enable reputation and community building, supported by a Community Portal for professionals and the public that connects to the New Media, hosts heterogeneous craft portforlios, and registers practitioner credentials. The efficacy of the approach will be piloted in eight representative craft instances with the cross-cutting objectives of Craft Education & Training, Design, Valorisation, and Community services across the range of materials.

Keywords: education,training,action,cognition,simulation,digitisation,haptics,immersivity
MAGNETIC HYPERTHERMIA FOR METASTASIZED TUMOR TREATMENT AND REMOTE MANIPULATION OF MICRODEVICES (GIULIa)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Materials Engineering
Panel description: Advanced materials development: performance enhancement, modelling, large -scale preparation, modification, tailoring, optimisation, novel  and combined use of materials, etc.
Countries involved: Italy
Call: ERC CONSOLIDATOR GRANTS (ERC-2021-COG, 2021)
Start date: 2023-02-01
End date: 2028-01-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2993750.0
EU funding (EUR): 2993750.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

In magnetic hyperthermia (MHT), magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) convert magneto-energy into heat under a time-varying magnetic field. MHT with MNPs is used in catalysis to promote reactions in solution and in cancer therapy, to ‘burn’ primary tumors in clinic, e.g. Glioblastoma, upon deposition of nanoparticles at the tumor site. The power of MHT, being an externally triggered approach to produce heat, goes beyond these actual uses. In GIULIa project I will apply MHT in tasks not yet explored to target the unmet needs of treatment of metastasized tumors and address MHT-mediated locomotion. MHT treatment of cancer metastases is now not doable because of scarce MNP dose accumulation at the spreading tumor sites. In GIULIa, MNPs designed for MHT, will be loaded in/on natural killer (NK) immune cells, which, intravenously injected, will deliver as Trojan horses the right dose of magnetic materials needed for MHT to the metastases. I will aim at raising the capability of NK and CAR-NK immune cells to infiltrate and recognize the tumor. This will merge synergic toxic effects of NK cells immunotherapy with MHT-heat damage of MNPs. Next, magnetic microdevices and their remote locomotion based on MHT-heat gradient, represent a new technological solution for delivery purposes with no tissue-depth attenuation for their actuation. Under MHT, I will explore the localization of heat spots on metallic magnetic-based heterostructures as a means to generate bubbles in a liquid and drag an ad hoc designed magnetic-microdevices to which the heterostructures are anchored. For the scale-up synthesis of metallic-magnetic heterostructures needed for the microdevices, I will merge an in-flow approach to an MHT-route synthesis. The heat at the MNP surface will be used as an in situ energy source to promote the growth of the metallic domain on the MNP. Advanced NK cells and microdevice technology of GIULIa will impact the medical fields of MNP/drug delivery, immunotherapy and smart robotics.

Keywords: magnetic hyperthermia,cancer therapy,engineering nk cells,microdevice,hybrid materials,magnetic nanoparticles,nanostructures,in flow synthesis
Hybrid Human-AI Decision Support for Enhanced Human Empowerment in Dynamic Situations (HumAIne)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness
Programme: Digital, Industry and Space
Theme: Digital
Destination: A human-centred and ethical development of digital and industrial technologies
Action type: Research and Innovation actions
Partnership: AI-DATA-ROBOTICS (co-programmed)
Countries involved: Italy,Israel,Greece,Slovenia,Germany,Netherlands,Bulgaria,Spain,Belgium,Cyprus,Portugal,United Kingdom
Call: AI for human empowerment (AI, Data and Robotics Partnership) (RIA) (HORIZON-CL4-2022-HUMAN-02, 2022)
Start date: 2023-10-01
End date: 2026-09-30
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 7658375.0
EU funding (EUR): 7658375.0
Participants: 18
Project status: SIGNED

HumAIne will research, develop, validate and promote a novel operating system for Human-AI collaboration, which will enable the development of advanced decision making applications in dynamic, unstructured environments in different industrial sectors. The HumAIne OS will empower AI solution integrators to implement Human-AI collaboration systems that outperform AI systems and humans when working in isolation. HumAIne’s developments will be integrated into a single OS platform, which will coordinate four interwind components offering Active Learning (AL), Neuro-Symbolic Learning, Swarm Learning (SL) as well eXplainable AI (XAI) capabilities. These advanced AI paradigms are ideal for exploiting true Human-AI collaboration since, in each of them, the worker is the key actor with complete control and understanding of the performed operations. AL enables the development of effective Human-in-the-Loop systems that involve humans when AI faces increased uncertainty. Neuro-Symbolic Learning combines DL with semantics and rules to complete highly complex tasks with high accuracy while requiring considerably less training data than current AI models. Advanced XAI models will be made available, providing explanations of models’ predictions while considering the global context instead of just analysing the feature importance of a single AI model. HumAIne’s XAI will provide guidance to humans to enable the timely optimisation of AL and SL models where human participants provide feedback dynamically as well as fine-tuning of Neuro-Symbolic models. The platform will handle various types of structured and unstructured data, including inputs from humans that will be semantically correlated through ontologies, knowledge graphs, and semantic interoperability. HumAIne will complement its platform with complementary resources (e.g., training) and will be build a vibrant community of interested parties around it, to drive exploitation and wider use of the project's results.

Keywords: active learning,swarm learning,neurosymbolic ai,trustedartificial intelligence,explainable ai,perceptive interfaces,extended reality,social performance evaluation,workers
Mechanisms of Camouflage in Cuttlefish (CAMOUFLAGE)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Advanced grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Panel description: Nervous system development, homeostasis and ageing , nervous system  function and dysfunction , systems neuroscience  and modelling , biological basis of cognitive processes and of behaviour, neurological and mental disorders – In humans and all other organisms
Countries involved: Germany
Call: ERC ADVANCED GRANTS (ERC-2023-ADG, 2023)
Start date: 2024-08-01
End date: 2029-07-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2499758.0
EU funding (EUR): 2499758.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Cephalopod camouflage (or crypsis) is one of the most fascinating behaviors in the animal kingdom. It is also very relevant for neuroscience, for many reasons. First, the ability of cephalopods to escape detection by vertebrate predators or invertebrate prey indicates that the perception of textures must follow similar principles in most species; if they did not, crypsis would not be successful. Because cephalopods and vertebrates diverged over 550 M years ago from a primitive common ancestor, these principles must reflect functional convergence. Second, cryptic patterning gives observers a read-out of an animal’s perception of visual scenes, eliminating the need for complex behavioral paradigms to question the animal. Third, cephalopod camouflage is controlled neurally by the brain, through the action of motoneurons onto a large array of specialized pigment cells (chromatophores) and based on visual information received by single-lens eyes. The behavior thus consists in transforming a retinal image into a matching skin pattern, via a large central brain and ultimately in the form of a fine motor output. Fourth, crypsis works as a statistical approximation rather than faithful copy of a scene. Such statistical matching is non-trivial: convolutional neural networks, for example, need hundreds of thousands of training trials to reach good performance. Fifth, because skin chromatophores are controlled by motoneurons, a chromatophore-resolution read-out of the state of the skin is an indirect read-out of the brain’s output, enabling large-scale neural imaging by proxy. This observation led us to develop methods to describe the skin output of cuttlefish at sub-chromatophore resolution and 25-60 frames/s, over hours to months. Our results in turn led to functional and mechanistic predictions about camouflage control. This 5-year project will test some of these predictions using molecular, ultrastructural, computational, physiological and behavioral approaches.

Keywords: brain evolution,cephalopod nervous system,convergence,neural circuits
Magnetically Actuated Stents: Enhancing Precision and Control in Vascular Interventions using Superparamagnetic Hydrogels Composites (MagStents)

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: Information Science and Engineering
Countries involved: Czechia
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): 207758.16
EU funding (EUR): 207758.16
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Cardiovascular diseases represent a critical global health challenge, affecting millions through the obstruction of blood vessels. Existing interventions, particularly conventional stents, are hindered by significant limitations such as rigidity and a high risk of restenosis. This proposal introduces MagStents, an innovative fusion of soft polymers and magnetic nanoparticles, designed to overcome these challenges. While traditional metal stents restore blood flow, they are constrained by inflexibility and potential vessel damage. In contrast, MagStents offer a biocompatible, flexible, and self-expanding alternative, constructed from dual crosslinked hydrogels. A key advancement of MagStents is their magnetic actuation, enabling precise positioning, adjustment, and post-deployment control using an external magnetic field. This capability introduces a novel dimension in cardiovascular intervention, reducing the need for surgical procedures by allowing real-time non-invasive adjustments. The research will focus on the development of Magnetic hydrogels (MagGels), engineered with controlled magnetic and mechanical properties. Advanced additive manufacturing technique will be employed to fabricate MagStents that incorporate these MagGels, ensuring both structural integrity and magnetic responsiveness. Comprehensive evaluations will assess biocompatibility, mechanical performance, and magnetic behavior, alongside the potential for controlled drug release in vitro. MagStents offer a significant advancement in interventional cardiology by enabling remote, non-invasive manipulation and enhanced adaptability. The research aims to establish a new standard for stent performance, improving patient outcomes and addressing the current limitations of cardiovascular disease treatments. Through their unique combination of magnetic control and biocompatibility, MagStents hold the potential to revolutionize stent technology and patient care.

Keywords: magnetic nanoparticles,spin dynamics,magnetic anisotropy