Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Improving the flow in the pipeline of the next generation of marine biodiscovery scientists (MarPipe)

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: Life Sciences
Countries involved: Ireland,Germany,Spain,Italy,Italy,Italy,Italy,Norway,Belgium,Belgium,Belgium,Netherlands,Netherlands,United Kingdom
Call: Innovative Training Networks (H2020-MSCA-ITN-2016, 2016)
Start date: 2016-11-01
End date: 2021-04-30
Duration (months): 54.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2853005.4
EU funding (EUR): 2853005.4
Participants: 14
Project status: CLOSED

MarPipe is a consortium of 11 partners (IBP-CNR, SZN, UiT, UNIABDN, GEOMAR, KULeuven, UCC, eCOAST, MEDINA, MicroDish, Italbiotec) based in 8 countries (I, N, UK, D, B, IRL, E, NL), including 3 from the non-academic sector. We will train 11 ESRs in marine drug-discovery, providing these researchers with unique skills toward becoming world leaders in this research field and to advance their careers in academia or industry. MarPipe PhDs will be trained in a programme including training-by-research, joint courses of technical, scientific and transferrable skills, active participation to public scientific events, and an intense inter-sectoral networking exchange plan. Marine organisms have the capacity to produce a variety of biologically potent natural products, including antibiotic and anticancer compounds. MarPipe aims at further development of antimicrobial and anticancer lead compounds originating from a previous EU project (PharmaSea), and will also explore the bioactivity of deep-sea samples (5000m) collected during the recent Eurofleet-2 project in the sub-Antarctic. The PhD students will thus be involved in all phases of the drug discovery pipeline, from isolation of new microbial strains to pre-clinical development of lead compounds. Importantly, they will also be trained to overcome existing bottlenecks in the field, e.g. low yields and low chemodiversity, isolation of known compounds, toxicity of compounds. The discovery rates of new bioactive antimicrobial and anticancer molecules will be enhanced through 11 PhD projects that cover all phases of the biodiscovery pipeline. As a final outcome of the project, we envisage the creation of a marine biodiscovery start-up company, which will include most of the MarPipe partners. The scientists of the future will be trained to become conscious about the socio-economic and policy context of their work, since several specific MarPipe PhD projects focus on legal, policy, innovation and entrepreneurship themes.

Keywords: marine bioresources,novel molecules,infections,cancer
Tracking Papyrus and Parchment Paths: An Archaeological Atlas of Coptic Literature. Literary Texts in their Geographical Context: Production, Copying, Usage, Dissemination and Storage (PAThs)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Advanced grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: The study of the human past
Panel description: Archaeology, history and memory
Countries involved: Italy
Call: ERC Advanced Grant (ERC-2015-AdG, 2015)
Start date: 2016-11-01
End date: 2022-10-31
Duration (months): 72.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2192507.0
EU funding (EUR): 2192507.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

PAThs aims to provide an in-depth diachronical understanding and effective representation of the geography of Coptic literary production, which is the corpus of writings, almost exclusively of religious contents, produced in Egypt between the 3rd and the 11th centuries in the Coptic language. PAThs takes an original and pluridisciplinary approach, combining, for the first time in this field, philology, codicology, archaeology and digital humanities, in order to explore the process of production, copying, usage, dissemination, and storage of Coptic works in relation to the concrete geographical contexts of origin of both the texts themselves and their related writing supports. By analysing texts and contents, paratexts (titles and colophons) and linguistic layers (style and dialects), the literary products will be strictly related not only to the places where they have been copied, but also to the single intellectual milieux responsible for their creation. Cultural orientations and literary tastes in specific areas of Egypt will be singled out, while changes in the manufacture of codices will emerge, in a manuscript tradition that offers the oldest witnesses for the use of codex. An exhaustive digital atlas of late antique and early medieval Egypt will be produced, based upon an interactive, flexible and versatile tool that will allow detailed and focused research and correlation of chronological, regional and thematic data. This will illustrate, as never before, the relationship between settlements, as revealed by the archaeological investigations, and intellectual production, as revealed by manuscripts, and will provide a new comprehensive perspective on the spread and development of Coptic literature and manuscript culture. A portal will integrate the atlas with several by-products, consisting of databases for collecting information on authors, works, manuscripts, and sites: an altogether new achievement in Coptic studies.

Keywords: christian egypt,coptic literature,coptic archaeology,digital humanities applied to archaeology and philology
Automated Measurement of Engagement Level of Children with Autism Spectrum Conditions during Human-robot Interaction (EngageME)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Individual Fellowships (IF)-Global Fellowships
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Panel: Information Science and Engineering
Countries involved: Germany,Germany,United States
Call: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF-GF) (H2020-MSCA-IF-2015, 2015)
Start date: 2016-10-01
End date: 2019-09-30
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 239860.8
EU funding (EUR): 239860.8
Participants: 3
Project status: CLOSED

Engaging children with ASC (Autism Spectrum Conditions) in communication centred activities during educational therapy is one of the cardinal challenges by ASC and contributes to its poor outcome. To this end, therapists recently started using humanoid robots (e.g., NAO) as assistive tools. However, this technology lacks the ability to autonomously engage with children, which is the key for improving the therapy and, thus, learning opportunities. Existing approaches typically use machine learning algorithms to estimate the engagement of children with ASC from their head-pose or eye-gaze inferred from face-videos. These approaches are rather limited for modeling atypical behavioral displays of engagement of children with ASC, which can vary considerably across the children. The first objective of EngageME is to bring novel machine learning models that can for the first time effectively leverage multi-modal behavioural cues, including facial expressions, head pose, vocal and physiological cues, to realize fully automated context-sensitive estimation of engagement levels of children with ASC. These models build upon dynamic graph models for multi-modal ordinal data, based on state-of-the-art machine learning approaches to sequence classification and domain adaptation, which can adapt to each child, while still being able to generalize across children and cultures. To realize this, the second objective of EngageME is to provide the candidate with the cutting-edge training aimed at expanding his current expertise in visual processing with expertise in wearable/physiological, and audio technologies, from leading experts in these fields. EngageME is expected to bring novel technology/models for endowing assistive robots with ability to accurately ‘sense’ engagement levels of children with ASC during robot-assisted therapy, while providing the candidate with a set of skills needed to become one of the frontiers in the emerging field of affect-sensitive assistive technology.

Keywords: affective computing,machine learning,computer vision,multi modal learning,autism,humanrobot,interaction
Elucidating fullerene-perovskite interactions by means of First-principles calculations: Towards a rational design of low cost solar cells (Fullerene_PSC)

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: Spain
Call: Individual Fellowships (H2020-MSCA-IF-2020, 2020)
Start date: 2022-07-01
End date: 2024-06-30
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 160932.48
EU funding (EUR): 160932.48
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Science is essential to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals implemented in the European Agenda 2030 towards the use of sustainable and clean energy. Solar energy, as the cleanest and the largest exploitable resource of energy, can potentially meet the growing requirements for the whole world’s energy needs beyond fossil fuels. Halide perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are considered as one of the most promising candidates for the next generation solar cells as their power conversion eciency (PCE) has rapidly increased up to 25.2%. With the goal to boost their commercialization, Fullerenes and derivatives have been introduced in PSC devices to improve the stability, suppress the hysteresis, and reduce the high temperatures commonly used to fabricate these devices. Developing novel fullerene derivatives for improving further the PCE and stability of PSCs is still highly desirable yet challenging. Nevertheless, it is not extensively explored the role of fullerene derivatives in PSC devices and it is still not thoroughly investigated how binding groups of fullerenes interact with perovskite surface and their influence in the electron mobility. In this project, the state-of-the-art computational chemistry will be used to understand the fullerene-perovskite interactions with the goal to rationally design new fullerene derivatives to improve the stability and efficiency of PSC devices. Density functional calculations will be employed to investigate the fullerene orientation on perovskite surfaces, binding energy, bandgap, the exciton delocalization and charge transfer in the fullerene-perovskite complexes in order to establish descriptors and correlations with the experimental data. The descriptors will be used to predict the preferred functionalization of fullerenes in order to conscientiously design the fullerene derivatives for PSC devices in order to take a step forward towards the future commercialization of these low-cost solar cell devices.

Keywords: solar cells,fullerenes,perovskites,renewable energies,density functional calculations,charge transfer,periodic boundary conditions
Developing new therapies for Batten disease (BATCure)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Societal Challenges
Programme: Health, demographic change and wellbeing
Theme: Treating and managing disease
Action type: Research and Innovation actions
Countries involved: Germany,Spain,Spain,Italy,Sweden,Sweden,Latvia,United Kingdom,United Kingdom,United Kingdom,United Kingdom,United Kingdom,Denmark,United Kingdom
Call: New therapies for rare diseases (H2020-PHC-2015-two-stage, 2015)
Start date: 2016-01-01
End date: 2019-06-30
Duration (months): 42.0
Total project cost (EUR): 6000681.25
EU funding (EUR): 5995768.75
Participants: 14
Project status: CLOSED

The goal of BATCure is to advance the development of new therapeutic options for a group of rare lysosomal diseases - neuronal ceroid lipofuscinoses (NCL) or Batten disease. There are > thousand affected across Europe, with a combined incidence of c.1:100 000. The NCLs are devastating and debilitating genetic disorders that mainly affect children, who suffer progressive dementia and motor decline, visual failure and epilepsy, leading to a long period of complete dependence on others, and eventually a premature death. Existing palliative treatment can reduce, but does not eliminate, the burden of seizures and the progressively worsening effects on the whole body due to decreasing CNS influence and control. There are no curative treatments in the clinic for any type of NCL. We will follow a novel integrated strategy to identify specific gene and small molecule treatments for three genetic types of Batten disease that include the most prevalent world-wide, juvenile CLN3 disease, and in southern and mediterranean Europe, CLN6 and CLN7 diseases. To develop new therapies for these 3 types of Batten disease, BATCure will: 1. Create new models, tools and technologies for developing and testing therapies 2. Further delineate disease biology and gene function to identify new therapeutic target pathways utilising yeast and pluripotent stem cell models 3. Identify biochemical therapeutic target pathways, facilitate effective evaluation of preclinical therapies and improve diagnostics 4. Extend a comprehensive natural history beyond the brain to include cardiology, the spinal cord, PNS, psychiatric and metabolic changes 5. Identify new and repurpose existing small molecule therapy 6. Triage new compound treatments in zebrafish, a high-throughput small vertebrate model 7. Deliver and monitor new treatments using mouse models 8. Provide a novel mechanism to involve patients and their families to inform and fully contribute to therapy development and prepare for clinical trials

Keywords: neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis,batten disease,childhood dementia,in vitro disease models,animal models,metabolomics,small molecule therapy,gene therapy,drug design
DELPHI: a framework to study Dark Matter and the emergence of galaxies in the epoch of reionization (DELPHI)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Universe sciences
Panel description: Astro-physics/-chemistry/-biology; solar system; planetary systems; stellar, galactic and extragalactic astronomy; cosmology; space sciences; astronomical instrumentation and data
Countries involved: Netherlands
Call: ERC Starting Grant (ERC-2016-STG, 2016)
Start date: 2017-03-01
End date: 2022-02-28
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1500000.0
EU funding (EUR): 1500000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Our Universe started as a dark featureless sea of hydrogen, helium, and dark matter of unknown composition about 13 and a half billion years ago. The earliest galaxies lit up the Universe with pinpricks of light, ushering in the era of ‘cosmic dawn’. These galaxies represent the primary building blocks of all subsequent galaxies and the sources of the first (hydrogen ionizing) photons that could break apart the hydrogen atoms suffusing all of space starting the process of ‘cosmic reionization’. By virtue of being the smallest bound structures in the early Universe, these galaxies also provide an excellent testbed for models wherein Dark Matter is composed of warm, fast moving particles as opposed to the sluggish heavy particles used in the standard Cold Dark Matter paradigm. Exploiting the power of the latest cosmological simulations as well as semi-analytic modelling rooted in first principles, DELPHI will build a coherent and predictive model to answer three of the key outstanding questions in physical cosmology: - how did the interlinked processes of galaxy formation and reionization drive each other? - what were the physical properties of early galaxies and how have they evolved through time to give rise to the galaxy properties we see today? - what is the nature (mass) of the mysterious Dark Matter that makes up 80% of the matter content in the Universe? The timescale of the ERC represents an excellent opportunity for progress on these fundamental questions: observations with cutting-edge instruments (e.g. the Hubble and Subaru telescopes) are providing the first tantalising glimpses of early galaxies assembling in an infant Universe, required to pin down theoretical models. The realistic results obtained by DELPHI will also be vital in determining survey strategies and exploiting synergies between forthcoming key state-of-the-art instruments such as the European-Extremely Large Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope and the Square Kilometre Array.
Regulation of Cellular Growth and Metabolism by C18:0 (C18Signaling)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Cellular, Developmental and Regenerative Biology
Panel description: Structure and function of the cell, cell-cell communication, embryogenesis, tissue differentiation, organogenesis, growth, development, evolution of development, organoids, stem cells, regeneration, therapeutic approaches
Countries involved: Germany
Call: ERC Consolidator Grant (ERC-2016-COG, 2016)
Start date: 2017-03-01
End date: 2023-08-31
Duration (months): 78.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2000000.0
EU funding (EUR): 2000000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

My lab studies how cells regulate their growth and metabolism during normal development and in disease. Recent work in my lab, published last year in Nature, identified the metabolite stearic acid (C18:0) as a novel regulator of mitochondrial function. We showed that dietary C18:0 acts via a novel signaling route whereby it covalently modifies the cell-surface Transferrin Receptor (TfR1) to regulate mitochondrial morphology. We found that modification of TfR1 by C18:0 ('stearoylation') is analogous to protein palmitoylation by C16:0 - it is a covalent thio-ester link and requires a transferase enzyme. This work made two conceptual contributions. 1) It uncovered a novel signaling route regulating mitochondrial function. 2) Relevant to this grant application, we found by mass spectrometry multiple other proteins that are stearoylated in mammalian cells. This thereby opens a new avenue of research, suggesting that C18:0 signals via several target proteins to regulate cellular growth and metabolism. I propose here to study this C18:0 signaling. To study C18:0 signaling we will exploit tools recently developed in my lab to 1) identify as complete a set as possible of proteins that are stearoylated in human and Drosophila cells, thereby characterizing the cellular 'stearylome', 2) study how stearoylation affects the molecular function of these target proteins, and thereby cellular growth and metabolism, and 3) study how stearoylation is added, and possibly removed, from target proteins. This work will change the way we view C18:0 from simply being a metabolite to being an important dietary signaling molecule that links nutritional uptake to cellular physiology. Via unknown mechanisms, dietary C18:0 is clinically known to have special properties for cardiovascular risk. Hence this proposal, discovering how C18:0 signals to regulate cells, will have implications for both normal development and for disease.

Keywords: drosophila
Developing Smart 3D Scaffolds based on Conductive Polymers and Carbon Nanotubes for Cardiac Tissue Engineering (NanoBeat)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Individual Fellowships (IF)-Global Fellowships
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Panel: Chemistry
Countries involved: Spain,United States
Call: Individual Fellowships (H2020-MSCA-IF-2016, 2016)
Start date: 2018-05-01
End date: 2021-04-30
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 257191.2
EU funding (EUR): 257191.2
Participants: 2
Project status: CLOSED

Conductive polymers (CP) appear as promising stimulus-responsing electroactive biomaterial for profileration of cells. CP are versatile materials that can be synthesized in different shapes and morphologies, offering a wide range of application in biosensing, implants, drug delivery and tissue engineering. Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs) have become promising advanced materials and gained increasing importance for applications in nanomedicine, such as diagnosis, disease treatment, imaging, and tissue engineering. CNTs can interact with cells, cross the biological barriers, and modify their functions and biology. More recently, CNTs have become a new tool to specifically interact with the central nervous systems and support tissue repair after brain damage. Take into account of such findings, we hypothesize that CNTs exert functional effects on networks of cardiac myocytes and, in addition, the combination of those two materials will generate an outstanding scaffold for other electroactive cell growth, such as cardiac cells. In my current research, I have developed 3D scaffolds of CNT with a CP skeleton (polypyrrole or PEDOT) and aftewards, the goal of my research and thus the aim of the current proposal is to test such scaffolds for cardiac tissue regeneration. More specific aims are: 1) Adapt already developed smart “scaffold-matrix supports” for heart tissue engineering and test its viability, comprising CNT and conductive polymers. 2) In vitro and in vivo studies of healthy and genetically modified cardiomyocites (CM) of neonatal and adult rat hearts to determine the interactions between cells and the smart scaffolds and demonstrate that such devices promote heart cell growth and change their electrical properties. 3) Test other carbon nanomaterial scaffolds generated in the host group as supports for cardiac tissue engineering.

Keywords: carbon nanotubes,polypyrrole,pedot