Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Mechanics of cells: the role of intermediate filaments (MECHANICS)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Condensed matter physics
Panel description: Structure, electronic properties, fluids, nanosciences, biological physics
Countries involved: Germany
Call: ERC Consolidator Grant (ERC-2016-COG, 2016)
Start date: 2017-05-01
End date: 2023-10-31
Duration (months): 78.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2413250.0
EU funding (EUR): 2413250.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

The mechanical properties of each of the over 200 cell types in the human body are perfectly well adapted to their function. The large variety of viscoelastic profiles, ranging from soft brain cells to stiff cartilage, and the temporal variability in the mechanical stress response when stationary cells begin to migrate, e.g. in embryogenesis, wound healing or cancer metastasis, is reflected in a surprisingly small number of molecular building blocks. Three distinct filament systems, actin filaments, microtubules and intermediate filaments (IFs), self-organize into a wealth of structural units, collectively termed the cytoskeleton. The main molecular players of this remarkable composite material are largely known. However, from a physics point of view, in particular IFs are poorly understood, despite their importance in health and disease and astonishing mechanical properties, like extreme extensibility and high flexibility. It is not known, how these properties are encoded in the molecular interactions of the protein filament and how they feed into the mechanical behavior of a whole cell. The aim of the proposed research is thus to establish a structure-mechanics-function relationship for this important component of the cytoskeleton. The genetic complexity of the IF protein family with 70 members that are expressed in a tissue specific manner requires a strategic approach involving well-defined model systems and the combination of in vitro and cell work. Direct mechanical testing by applying stress and in situ high-resolution imaging will link mechanical properties to molecular interactions in the hierarchical IF architecture. The results of these in vitro studies will be related to cell experiments to decipher the link between IF type and cell mechanics. The work program will lead to models that predict, how modifications, e.g., in the type of IF protein or specific charge interactions, are associated with changes in cell mechanics and eventually in cell function.

Keywords: cytoskeleton,intermediate filaments,mechanical properties,optical trap,confocal imaging,microfluidics
Biofoulant-repelling surfaces for catheters and other biomedical devices (BiofoulRepel)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — 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-2016 (ERC-2016-PoC, 2016)
Start date: 2017-01-01
End date: 2018-06-30
Duration (months): 18.0
Total project cost (EUR): 150000.0
EU funding (EUR): 150000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The object of this proof of concept project is to modify the surfaces of biomedical devices intended for contact with human tissue, such as catheters, stents or contact lenses, to render them repellent to biofoulants, based on discoveries made in our current ERC project HydrationLube. This will render such surfaces, and the devices, far more resistant to health-threatening infections. Our ERC project demonstrated that boundary layers based on phosphatidylcholine (PC) lipids (in the form of liposomes, bilayers or polymer-lipid complexes) can expose extremely hydrated interfaces, which are not only strongly lubricating but, as we recently showed, are also capable – particularly at hydrogel surfaces - of massively suppressing the adsorption of common biofoulants including proteins and bacteria. We now propose to use this finding to overcome, through suitable surface treatment, the undesirable effects of such fouling and biofilm formation on tissue-contacting devices, which impose a huge health and cost burden. Thus, neutralizing bacteria in biofilm may require a 1000-times higher dose of antibiotic compared to planktonic bacteria. Moreover, such infections are frequent: some 4% of all implanted vascular grafts and medical heart valves become infected, as do 2% of implanted joint prostheses and 5% of the 2x106 fracture fixation devices that are used in the U.S. alone each year. The cost of curing such infections may exceed $50,000 per case, apart from the burden of human suffering and morbidity, and they account for over 50% of all Hospital Associated Infections (HAI). The current project, working through 5 work-packages, will validate the feasibility of such anti-fouling treatments on actual devices, will carry out competitive analysis and market research, explore the commercialization process and the IPR position, and seek contacts with appropriate industrial partners to further develop the commercialization of our technology.

Keywords: biofouling,anti fouling treatment,fouling repellent surfaces,catheters,biomedical devices,contact lenses,hydrogels,fouling repellent hydrogels,fouling repellent membranes
Multi-Religious Encounters in Urban Settings (MEUS)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: The Social World and Its Diversity
Panel description: Sociology, social psychology, social anthropology, education sciences, communication studies
Countries involved: United Kingdom,United Kingdom,United Kingdom
Call: ERC Starting Grant (ERC-2018-STG, 2018)
Start date: 2019-10-01
End date: 2025-04-30
Duration (months): 67.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1498666.0
EU funding (EUR): 749968.19
Participants: 3
Project status: SIGNED

This comparative ethnographic project asks, how do people of different faiths coexist in cities? Questions of coexistence take on urgency in a time of increasing religiously-inflected flashpoints across the globe. How can we think about religious coexistence beyond prevailing frameworks of tolerance or conflict? MEUS will explore multi-religious encounters in non-secular urban contexts, ie. areas where there is a state religion or where religion has salience in the public sphere. Research will be organised into three complementary and contrasting sub-projects in South Asia (Karachi), East Africa (Nairobi), and Southern Europe (Palermo). The sites are similar, having served historically as encounter sites for major religions, but differ in their vantage points on religious pluralism. The project has two objectives: 1)to examine what modes of religious co-habitation emerge in aspiring urban settings; and 2)to develop a cross-regional comparative framework about religious pluralism that de-centers secular-liberal ideas of tolerance and opens space for alternate modes of coexistence. MEUS will ask: How do people of different religious faiths coexist in cities? What tensions and contestations does such coexistence articulate or give rise to? Do aspirations for socioeconomic mobility engender encounters with religious ‘others’ and, if so, how do people make sense of this contact? MEUS is novel in its ethnographic and comparative frame. Its interventions within debates on pluralism will challenge the monistic tendencies of studies of religion (eg. the anthropology of Islam) and counter the hegemony of secularism in ideas on coexistence. MEUS is cognizant that the current work on coexistence, outside of liberal contexts, is largely regional and interpreted as exceptions to the norm. Instead, MEUS pushes against the limits of regional comparisons to develop a cross-regional, historically sensitive understanding of coexistence with the aim of provincializing secularism.

Keywords: islam,christianity,hinduism,pakistan,italy,kenya,secularism,urban
Smart LightwAve Multi-modal Distributed Acoustic Strain and Temperature sensor (SLAM-DAST) (SLAM-DAST)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Industrial Leadership
Action type: Innovation actions
Countries involved: Italy,Italy,North Macedonia,Norway,Sweden,Netherlands
Call: Fast Track to Innovation (FTI) (H2020-EIC-FTI-2018-2020, 2020)
Start date: 2021-04-01
End date: 2024-06-30
Duration (months): 39.0
Total project cost (EUR): 3414905.35
EU funding (EUR): 2751596.25
Participants: 6
Project status: SIGNED

Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) and Distributed Temperature-Strain Sensing (DTSS) are two ground-breaking Distributed Fibre Optic Sensor (D-FOS) technologies that allow large-scale measuring and mapping of acoustic vibrations, temperature, mechanical deformations, and pressure in a large variety of consumer-based, civil, industrial, and environmental applications, in particular for attaining the widespread technological nerve system in smart city environments, for instance in smart home/household monitoring (heating, survelliance, fire detection, structural heath, and so forth), as well as in product distribution/logistics (traffic, distribution and plant monitoring). DAS and DTSS employ a low-priced optical fibre cable installed along the assets (e.g. homes/households in a neighborhood) to be monitored for up to 100 km through an interrogator equipment that sweeps a “virtual sensor” to measure the physical parameters individually at any cable point. This project main objective is to develop, prototype and demonstrate, both in civil/industrial and especially in household/smart-city case studies, a new, cost-effective, Smart LightwAve Multi-modal Distributed Acoustic Strain and Temperature photonic sensing system (SLAM-DAST), which will integrate: - Distributed Temperature and mechanical deformation (Strain) Sensing (DTSS) and - Distributed Acoustic vibrations optical Sensing (DAS) SLAM-DAST aims at securing the conditions of a disruptive market exploitation, at an industrial as well as at a large scale consumer-oriented level, of the project’s results by: - supporting the product characterisation-standardisation through open access to performance test benches; - adopting open innovation policies about general system architecture and embedded data pre-processing; - promoting vendor interoperability through the use of open standards and formats; - creating shared value through knowledge-spreading and international networking with key market access points.

Keywords: sensors,smart cities,acoustic sensor,strain sensor,temperature sensor,optical fibers
A revolutionary HYDRO POWER technology to sustainably exploit super-low-head water steps (Turbulent)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Industrial Leadership
Programme: Innovation in SMEs
Action type: SME instrument
Countries involved: Belgium
Call: SME instrument (H2020-SMEInst-2018-2020-2, 2019)
Start date: 2019-08-01
End date: 2022-12-31
Duration (months): 41.0
Total project cost (EUR): 3511500.0
EU funding (EUR): 2458050.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Energy utilities, investors and project developers are actively looking for decentralized solutions that combine sustainability with stable and risk-free energy production at low cost. Since wind and solar are highly intermittent, hydropower is to take an important role in the energy mix. An alternative to large dam facilities is small hydropower technologies but they still present the major challenge of size reduction in order to lower the usable head (water height) to under 3 meters. All kinds of hydropower techniques have been tried to scale down for local and to lower the usable head to under 3 meters, without success until now. TURBULENT provides a reliable, cost efficient, micro hydropower plant uniquely designed to use a very low head stream (<3m) without impact. Based on a biomimicry, the power plant generates energy close to the end user ranging from 15kW to 100kW. • No dams= Fish friendliness = Reduction of civil works >50% . • Smaller, lighter, easier installation and maintenance. • Biomimic impeller design = Double energy production with same size • =Cheaper cost-of-energy €0,026/kWh. (Solar is € 0.06kWh) Current TRL is 7. 2 Real scale demonstrators and 1 commercial setting succesfully completed & in operation. MARKET: Global <3m hydropower installation potential of 341GW! This represents a global market opportunity of €1x10^12 (1 Billion €). Turbulent is unleashing the potential of micro hydropower and expanding the technology in EU & abroad countries through trained and certified distributors (Viral in social media +100M views = +3.5K requests received). The SME project will allow to accelerate the market entry and the company team growth (37 employees by 2023). In 2021 the company will reach profitability and the forecast show a cumulative EBITDA in 5 years of €64M. Funding needs. A first seed round of €1.6M has been signed with commitment to sum another €1.6M in 2020. In this project we request 2.3M to scale up.

Keywords: distributed energy,renewables,zero carbon,hydro electric,small hydro power,distributed generation,energy mix,resilient,water,low head
Bioinspired Hierarchical MetaMaterials for Railways (BioMetaRail)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: Future and Emerging Technologies (FET)
Theme: EIC Pathfinder
Destination: Novel ideas for radically new technologies
Action type: Coordination and support actions
Countries involved: Italy,Italy,Italy,France
Call: FET Innovation Launchpad (H2020-FETOPEN-2018-2019-2020-4, 2020)
Start date: 2021-09-01
End date: 2022-08-31
Duration (months): 12.0
Total project cost (EUR): 129318.57
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 4
Project status: CLOSED

Railway-induced ground-borne vibrations are one of the main causes of noise pollution generated by trains. Noise pollution is a serious concern for public health, causing the loss of about 1 million years of healthy life every year in the EU. This problem will probably worsen due to the expected increase of railway traffic as an answer to the EU carbon emission reduction goals. For this reason, reducing ground-borne vibration is of paramount importance to protect citizen lives and enable carbon emission reductions. However, the products currently available on the market struggle to solve this issue due to multiple limitations, i.e. low attenuation performances, high costs and high impact during installation (railway track removal and railway traffic interruption). Bioinspired MetaMaterials (MMs), which are artificially designed materials inspired by shapes and topology found in nature, have the potential to increase vibration reduction performance, with reduced cost and easy installation (no track removal) compared to current solutions. Their study and development are the objectives of the FET Open BOHEME project, whose preliminary results (i.e. increased attenuation in specific frequency ranges via the combination of different mechanisms) are promising for railway applications. Starting from these results and the on-field experience of the startup PhononicVibes in railway vibration, BioMetaRail will determine the innovation potential and feasibility of bioinspired MMs in the railway sector. This will be done by (i) identifying the most suitable designs from BOHEME, assessing their cost-effectiveness, (ii) benchmarking the existing solutions available on the market, (iii) engaging the most relevant end users among Railway Infrastructure Owners to assess the market potential of the proposed solution and (iv) defining the business case and the related commercialization process.

Keywords: bioinspired materials,hierarchical structures,metamaterials,ground borne vibrations,railway vibrations
Future Proofing of ICT Trust Chains: Sustainable Operational Assurance and Verification Remote Guards for Systems-of-Systems Security and Privacy (ASSURED)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Industrial Leadership
Programme: Information and Communication Technologies
Action type: Research and Innovation actions
Countries involved: Germany,Ireland,Israel,Germany,Cyprus,Greece,Greece,Greece,Switzerland,Netherlands,Netherlands,Denmark,United Kingdom,Luxembourg
Call: Building blocks for resilience in evolving ICT systems (H2020-SU-ICT-2019, 2019)
Start date: 2020-09-01
End date: 2023-08-31
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 4999760.0
EU funding (EUR): 4999760.0
Participants: 16
Project status: SIGNED

ASSURED’s vision is to introduce a ground-breaking policy-driven, formally verified, runtime assurance framework in the complex CPS domain. As the demand for increasingly autonomous CPSs grows, so does the need for certification mechanisms to ensure their safety. Current methods towards software and system validation requires exhaustive offline testing of every possible state scenario PRIOR to fielding the system. In this context, novel assurance services ensure that the control output of such controllers does not put the system or people interacting with it in danger, especially in safety-critical applications as the ones envisaged in the ASSURED Demonstrators. ASSURED leverages and enhances runtime property-based attestation and verification techniques to allow intelligent (unverified) controllers to perform within a predetermined envelope of acceptable behaviour, and a risk management approach to extend this to a larger SoS. ASSURED elaborates over the coordination of deployed TEE agents in horizontal scope, encompassing numerous technologies applicable to everything from edge devices to gateways in the cloud. Such technologies DICE for binding devices to firmware/software, trusted execution environments, formal modelling of protocols and software processes, software attestation, blockchain technology for distributed verification of transactions between system elements and control-flow attestation techniques for enhancing the operational correctness of such devices. In this frame, we consider the mutual verification of system components in distributed multi-operator environments. Our approach ensures a smooth transition and advancement beyond current strategies where security management services are considered in an isolated manner relying on traditional perimeter security and forensics in a “catch-and-patch” fashion without dwelling on the safety of the overall network as a whole, to holistic network security services capable of minimizing attack surfaces.

Keywords: remote property based runtime attestation,runtime certifications,operational assurance,and verification,lightweight trustworthy crypto operations,blockchain and distributed ledgers
Critical Raw materials Elimination by a top-down Approach To hydrogen and Electricity generation (CREATE)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Industrial Leadership
Programme: Nanotechnologies, Advanced Materials, Advanced Manufacturing and Processing, and Biotechnology
Theme: Advanced materials
Action type: Research and Innovation actions
Countries involved: Italy,Israel,Germany,Germany,Germany,Spain,Finland,France,France,United States,United Kingdom
Call: Innovative and sustainable materials solutions for the substitution of critical raw materials in the electric power system (H2020-NMBP-2016-two-stage, 2016)
Start date: 2017-01-01
End date: 2020-12-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 4480978.02
EU funding (EUR): 4318478.02
Participants: 12
Project status: CLOSED

CREATE aims at developing innovative membrane electrode assemblies for low-temperature polymer-electrolyte fuel cell (FC) and electrolyzer (EL) with much reduced cost. This will be achieved via elimination or drastic reduction of critical raw materials in their catalysts, in particular platinum group metals (PGM). Key issues with present low-temperature FC & EL are the high contents of PGM in devices based on proton-exchange-membrane (PEM) and the need for liquid electrolytes in alkaline FC and EL. To overcome this, we will shift from PEM-based cells to 1) pure anion-conducting polymer-electrolytes and 2) to bipolar-membrane polymer electrolytes. The latter comprises anion and proton conducting ionomers and a junction. Bipolar membranes allow adapting the pH at each electrode, thereby opening the door to improved performance or PGM-free catalysts. Both strategies carry the potentiality to eliminate or drastically reduce the need for PGM while maintaining the advantages of PEM-based devices. In strategy 1, novel anion-exchange ionomers and membranes will be developed and interfaced with catalysts based on Earth-abundant metal oxides or metal-carbon composites for the oxygen reactions, and with ultralow PGM or PGM-free catalysts for the hydrogen reactions. In strategy 2, novel bipolar membrane designs, or designs unexplored for FC & EL, will be developed and interfaced with catalysts for the oxygen reactions (high pH side of the bipolar membrane) and with catalysts for the hydrogen reactions (low pH side). The ionomers and oxygen reaction catalysts developed in strategy 1 will be equally useful for strategy 2, while identified PGM-free and ultralow-PGM catalysts will be implemented for the hydrogen reactions on the acidic side. Polymer-electrolyte FC & EL based on those concepts will be evaluated for targeted applications, i.e. photovoltaic electricity storage, off-grid back-up power and H2 production. The targeted market is distributed small-scale systems.

Keywords: fuel cell,electrolysis,anion exchange membrane,bipolar membrane,electrochemistry,electrocatalysis