Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Comorbidity and Synapse Biology in Clinically Overlapping Psychiatric Disorders (COSYN)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Societal Challenges
Programme: Health, demographic change and wellbeing
Theme: Understanding health, wellbeing and disease
Action type: Research and Innovation actions
Countries involved: Germany,Germany,Germany,Finland,Switzerland,Sweden,France,Netherlands,Netherlands,United Kingdom,Denmark,United Kingdom,Denmark
Call: Understanding common mechanisms of diseases and their relevance in co-morbidities (H2020-PHC-2015-two-stage, 2015)
Start date: 2016-01-01
End date: 2020-12-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 6000000.0
EU funding (EUR): 5925000.0
Participants: 15
Project status: CLOSED

COSYN integrates outstanding European academic and three large Pharma to exploit genomic findings for intellectual disability (ID), autism, and schizophrenia. We capitalise on comorbidity, from clinic to cells and synapses, and have access to large existing samples. We focus on rare genetic variants of strong effect in patients with clinical comorbidity. Our aims are: (1) Understand comorbidity by comparing symptom and syndrome overlap with novel neurobiological criteria; (2) Elucidate mechanisms of comorbidity using neurobiology for the major genomic clue of synaptic dysfunction to unravel the cellular mechanisms of comorbidity; (3) Generate novel neuronal cell models by using advanced technologies to make neurons from carefully selected patients, and use genome editing to create or correct genetic variants. Multiple advanced neuroscience platforms are in place to evaluate an extensive set of molecular and cellular parameters, and to identify alterations in synaptic biology characteristic of ID, autism, and schizophrenia. These cellular models will, with Pharma partners, be up-scaled to provide “industry-standard” cellular assays for compound screening; (4) Refine diagnostic tools, use novel genomic and cellular features to improve disease classification and discriminate specific patient subtypes; and (5) Case studies in precision medicine: with Pharma partners, identify patients with a genetic change whose consequences can be reproducibly ameliorated in vitro by an approved medication. Recommend to the patient and clinician a double-blinded, N-of-one crossover case study to evaluate the clinical utility of a medication precisely indicated for that person. COSYN is an integrated, state-of-art, bench-to-bedside programme focused on personalised therapeutics. COSYN is a crucial next step in “decoding” the genetic findings via intensive focus on the clinical and molecular comorbidities of ID, autism, and schizophrenia.

Keywords: comorbidity,assays,diagnostics,therapy,schizophrenia,autism,intellectual disability,cellular models,ipscs,genome editing,high content screening,synapse,compound screening
Time of damage in classic galactosemia: is prenatal toxicity a determinant factor? (TIME)

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: Netherlands
Call: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF-EF) (H2020-MSCA-IF-2014, 2014)
Start date: 2015-10-01
End date: 2018-01-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 177598.8
EU funding (EUR): 177598.8
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The TIME project aims to ascertain the time at which the toxicity observed in classic galactosemia begins, particularly if it begins prenatally. Recent advances in the molecular bases of classic galactosemia have taken research a step further towards therapy development. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to elucidate when the damage accurately begins, in order to define the time at which therapy should be initiated so that it can effectively prevent the development of long-term complications. The Galactosemia Research Group (GRG) in Maastricht has recently developed a zebrafish model of classic galactosemia, which is particularly indicated for studying developmental processes. I will use transient embryological- and whole life-knockout galt-zebrafish to analyze damage in target-organs at different stages of pre- and post-natal development and compare them to the wild-type fish, which will allow determining the exact time of damage onset in classic galactosemia. The GRG is a world-renowned multidisciplinary group that will strongly enhance my professional and personal qualifications as a researcher. In turn, I will contribute with my expertise in molecular bases of rare metabolic disorders. This project constitutes a major milestone for this disorder, as it will allow the development of an effective treatment, which in turn will decrease galactosemic patients' requirement for medical assistance and by making them fit to work and to fully engage in the society. Prof. Patrick Cunningham (Trinity College, Dublin) once said: To be a researcher is not just to be in the laboratory, you work for the world, you work for the society. This sentence illustrates what I have always felt to be my purpose as a researcher. Ever since I initiated my scientific career that I am fully committed in taking research in rare disorders towards the improvement of patients’ health and lives, and this fellowship constitutes an important step towards that commitment.

Keywords: classic galactosemia,rare disease,prenatal toxicity,postnatal toxicity,brain impairments,fertility impairments
Tomorrow’s mobility solutions, today (MotionTech)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Industrial Leadership
Programme: Innovation in SMEs
Action type: SME instrument
Countries involved: Switzerland
Call: SME instrument (H2020-SMEInst-2018-2020-1, 2018)
Start date: 2018-08-01
End date: 2018-11-30
Duration (months): 4.0
Total project cost (EUR): 71429.0
EU funding (EUR): 50000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Today, around 90% of patients living with lower limb amputation do not have tailored liners and need to resort to standard–shape prosthetic liners due to cost and technology limitations. However, that causes them discomfort and pain whilst they walk. Worse, despite extensive science providing evidence of the advantages of customizing the local hardness of the prosthetic liner to the underlying tissues of the patients (e.g. increased comfort & overall mobility, etc.), there is no viable solution to provide adapted multi-hardness prosthetic liners to amputated patients. In response, MotionTech offers 3D scanning and delivers 3D printed tailored liners with a novel service model based on POC 3D scanning that allows us to deliver tailored multi-hardness liners to O&P (orthotic & prosthetic) centres within 48 hours (at €850 for new and €700 for renewal liners). We are seizing the advances in 3D technology, the need for prosthetics due to the ageing society and cost pressure on healthcare providers. This allows us to tap into an addressable market of €75M in the EU and €60M in the US, conservatively assuming that only 25% of amputees will receive tailored liners, which is close to €150M addressable market. Swiss Motion Technologies SA was created in late 2016 by Kevin Mamalis, an electro-mechanical engineer specialised in additive manufacturing technologies. He was joined by two further co-founders. The Phase 1 funding will help us gather the necessary insights for a Phase 2 product improvement project after which we can enter the market. We therefore aim to give birth to an impactful technology for orthopaedic patients that is based on 3D scanning, 3D printing and a software suite that replace inaccurate manual measurements and liners.

Keywords: amputee,prosthesis,liner,inclusion,mobility
Investigation of nonlinear stimulated emission in optically excited dielectrics (LADIE)

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: Physics
Countries involved: Denmark
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): 207312.0
EU funding (EUR): 207312.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The nonlinear stimulated emission of ultraviolet light in a piece of optically excited – and thus metalized – glass that usually absorbs light is counterintuitive to what has been known for many decades about light-material interaction. However, this is exactly what was recently experimentally observed for the first time. Although a preliminary explanation and model describing the effect of laser amplification in excited dielectrics (LADIE) exists, a manifold of questions about fundamental processes like the universality, the potential of nonlinear light amplification and how giant-band-gap-renormalization in dielectrics works remain unanswered. In this project, a thorough investigation of the novel phenomenon and the associated rare nonlinear stimulated emission will be initiated. On the one hand, this study is based on femtosecond spectroscopy, deploying pump-probe experiments, utilizing light-conversion and pulse-shaping techniques that will be applied to a large variety of custom-made samples. On the other hand, the experimental studies will be complemented by advanced theoretical modelling of the material excitation that will be extended towards incorporating a proper description of the new mechanisms. The investigation of the LADIE effect will most likely open up an entirely new scientific field with many new surprises in store and the potential for novel derived applications. Its perspective is a revolution in laser technology, building high power nonlinear laser amplifiers in a huge variety of band-gap materials, which has a clear interdisciplinary aspect to semiconductor and optoelectronic research (i.e. telecommunication hardware), biophysics (cell surgery, nonlinear microscopy) and nonlinear optics in general.

Keywords: ultrafast dynamics,femtosecond spectroscopy,strong field excitation,transient optical phenomena,pump probe experiments,femtosecond lasers,laser material processing,laser ablation
Understanding mortality: Biosocial determinants across cohorts, time and place (MORTAL)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator 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
Call: ERC CONSOLIDATOR GRANTS (ERC-2020-COG, 2020)
Start date: 2021-06-01
End date: 2026-05-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1999342.0
EU funding (EUR): 1999342.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

The aim of MORTAL is to challenge current non-empirical narratives and produce fundamentally new knowledge of mechanisms underlying mortality trends. The health and longevity of a population is a key barometer of overall welfare, reflecting the cumulative effects of the broader social, economic, and environmental conditions in which people live. Recently, demographic alarm bells have sounded as life expectancy has fallen in the U.S. and mortality improvements in the UK and other parts of Europe have stalled. Whether these trends are due to short term causes such as “deaths of despair” due to drugs, alcohol and suicide or longer-term changes in risk factors such as obesity is not yet known, and some work in this area has lacked empirical rigour. For the first time, MORTAL will combine theory and data across multiple disciplines (biology, epidemiology, sociology, economics, genetics) with demographic theory on the challenging three-dimensional age-period-cohort space in which mortality trends emerge to understand the underlying drivers of population mortality. I propose to (1) integrate macro and micro level data sources to document changes in social and biological risk factors across cohorts, time and place (2) utilize innovative measures of biological risk (epigenetics, microbiome) to understand how life experiences and exposures across cohorts influence trajectories of health and ageing (3) test important selection dynamics across cohorts and their implications for mortality trends including selection into education and selective migration (4) develop a new interdisciplinary conceptual model and simulations of how cohort changes in social and biological risk may influence observed mortality trends going forward. Building a model from cells to society and across age, period, and cohort, MORTAL will integrate knowledge across disparate disciplines to answer the vital question: as populations, how long do we live, and why?

Keywords: demography,mortality,population health,biomarkers,cohorts,biosocial
Policy Learning of Motor Skills for Humanoid Robots (SKILLS4ROBOTS)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Systems and communication engineering
Panel description: Electrical, electronic, communication, optical and systems engineering
Countries involved: Germany
Call: ERC Starting Grant (ERC-2014-STG, 2014)
Start date: 2015-07-01
End date: 2021-06-30
Duration (months): 72.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1405572.5
EU funding (EUR): 1405572.5
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The goal of SKILLS4ROBOTS is to develop a autonomous skill learning system that enables humanoid robots to acquire and improve a rich set of motor skills. This robot skill learning system will allow scaling of motor abilities up to fully anthropomorphic robots while overcoming the current limitations of skill learning systems to only few degrees of freedom. To achieve this goal, it will decompose complex motor skills into simpler elemental movements – called movement primitives – that serve as building blocks for the higher-level movement strategy and the resulting architecture will be able to address arbitrary, highly complex tasks – up to robot table tennis for a humanoid robot. Learned primitives will be superimposed, sequenced and blended. Four recent breakthroughs in the PI’s research will make this project possible due to successes on the representation of the parametric probabilistic representations of the elementary movements, on probabilistic imitation learning, on relative entropy policy search-based reinforcement learning and on the modular organization of the representation. These breakthroughs will allow create a general, autonomous skill learning system that can learn many different skills in the exact same framework without changing a single line of programmed code. To accomplish this goal, our skill learning system will autonomously extract the necessary movement primitives out of observed trajectories, learn to generalize these primitives to different situations and select, sequence or combine them such that complex behavior can be synthesized out of the primitive building blocks. We will evaluate our autonomous learning framework on a real humanoid robot platform with 60 degrees of freedom and show that it can learn a large variety of new skills.
Is the hippocampal mossy fiber synapse a detonator in vivo? (IN VIVO MOSSY)

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: Austria
Call: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF-EF) (H2020-MSCA-IF-2015, 2015)
Start date: 2016-04-01
End date: 2018-03-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 166156.8
EU funding (EUR): 166156.8
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

A commonly repeated maxim is that an individual cortical neuron receives synaptic input from tens of thousands of presynaptic partners, with each individual connection carrying only minor weight. In that case, concerted firing by many presynaptic neurons is required to cause an action potential in the postsynaptic neuron. However, there is inconclusive evidence that the mossy fiber synapse (the second connection in Cajal’s heavily studied “trisynaptic circuit” of the hippocampus) is powerful enough to translate a single presynaptic spike into a postsynaptic spike - termed “detonation”. If true, this would have substantial implications for our understanding of learning and memory, spatial navigation, and pattern recognition. I propose to use simultaneous two-color, two-photon calcium imaging of presynaptic mossy fiber terminals and postsynaptic CA3 pyramidal neurons in awake mice navigating along a linear track, in order to conclusively confirm or rule out the detonation hypothesis. This preparation will allow me to distinguish between detonator, conditional detonator, and subdetonator synapses, and more generally to quantify the number of simultaneously active mossy fiber boutons necessary to cause CA3 spiking during behavior. These results would have substantial implications for established models of associative memory and spatial navigation, and more generally for information transfer in the hippocampus. Furthermore, the techniques developed will permit future studies whereby the conjunctive effect of additional inputs (e.g. from entorhinal cortex, and local interneurons) can be studied by optogenetic manipulation.

Keywords: hippocampus,spatial navigation,synaptic transmission,calcium imaging
Processing Systems with Optical Delay (ProDelSys)

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: Physics
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call: Individual Fellowships (H2020-MSCA-IF-2017, 2017)
Start date: 2018-06-01
End date: 2020-05-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 183454.8
EU funding (EUR): 183454.8
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The primary goal of this project is to train a talented young researcher, Dr. Marina Zajnulina, with a strong academic background in nonlinear fibre and semiconductor optics, laser physics and general nonlinear-wave theory, through a research programme focused on developing of novel all-optical processing systems based on ultra-short fibre lasers, and their usage in a range of practical applications. There is high demand in ultra-short fibre lasers, because they are highly desirable as light sources due to their flexibility, simplicity and cost-efficiency. The project will include theoretical, experimental, and numerical studies of optical ultra-short pulse generation and propagation in a processing system based on an ultra-short fibre laser with optical feedback. To guarantee an all-over success of the project, several European world-leading academic and industrial (non-academic) partners will participate in the project as secondment hosts and co-hosts and consultants. The success of this project will contribute knowledge to the fields of laser science and technology, and establish an internationally leading position for Europe in the industrial applications relevant to telecommunications, as well as other high-demand fields such as spectroscopy, frequency metrology, and instrument calibration. Further, this project will explore the commercialisation of a novel laser as a processing system and enable a greater market share for fibre laser applications. A long-term collaboration between the Fellow and the host and co-hosts will be established ultimately resulting in a new level of optical processing and laser devices and technologies and enhancing the European leading position in this highly competitive commercial field.

Keywords: optical processing systems,fibre lasers,laser design and development,optical pulse shaping,machine learning,nonlinear wave theory
Nitrogen-enriched plasma activated water, an unparalleled plant feeding system (Plan2fix)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Industrial Leadership
Programme: Innovation in SMEs
Action type: SME instrument
Countries involved: Netherlands
Call: SME instrument (H2020-SMEInst-2018-2020-1, 2018)
Start date: 2018-12-01
End date: 2019-03-31
Duration (months): 4.0
Total project cost (EUR): 71429.0
EU funding (EUR): 50000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Nitrogen is a vital nutrient in plant development and is currently mainly supplied through synthetic Nitrogen (N) fertilizers. Currently produced from fossil-fuels (natural gas and coal), this artificial Nitrogen (NH3) can only be absorbed by plants once it is transformed by microorganisms into NO3-. However, during this biological process, up to 70% of N is lost into the soil, resulting in soil and water pollution. Only in Europe, the direct cost derived from this contamination has been quantified in around 14 billion/year. VitalFluid, start-up with long expertise in plasma technology, has developed an innovative plasma nitrogen fixation unit -PLAN2FIX- able to extract N directly from the air and dissolve it into water on the spot, through our patented plasma activation technology. The resulting water (plasma activated water, PAW) is enriched in NO3-, which is readily absorbed by plants. PAW can be used as N-fertilizer and customized so that the exact amount of N the plant can absorb is delivered, and thus no N is lost into the environment. Our N-enriched PAW is a sustainable and non-pollutant alternative to synthetic N-fertilizers that increases the uptake of nutrients by 20%, has an optimal acidity of pH 5,5 and active oxygen species that kill pathogens and serves as an extra oxygen nutrient. Besides, PLAN2FIX can be powered by renewable energy and connected to the irrigation system, providing a practically free zero-carbon PAW on the spot. No transport, storage, or distribution network is needed to supply farmers with our fertilizer, availability is ensured while price volatility (fossil-fuel price) avoided. Farmers will just need to invest in Plan2Fix units to have an unlimited source of liquid N-fertilizer, eliminating their dependence on suppliers and cutting costs by 48% per hectare/year (35% lower total cost).

Keywords: fertilizer,nitrogen fixation,organic,pollution