Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Unravelling the Physiological Roles of GPCR Voltage Dependence (GPCR Volt Dep Role)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator 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: Israel
Call: ERC CONSOLIDATOR GRANTS (ERC-2022-COG, 2022)
Start date: 2023-10-01
End date: 2028-09-30
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1992500.0
EU funding (EUR): 1992500.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) are broadly expressed in the brain, mediate responses to many molecules, and are crucial for normal brain function and therapeutic intervention. 20 years ago, it was shown that the activity of many GPCRs is regulated by membrane potential. e.g. the activity of cholinergic M2R muscarinic and metabotropic glutamate mGluR3 receptors is reduced by depolarization, and that of M1R and mGluR1a is increased. However, due to high technical challenges, a crucial question remains unanswered: what are the physiological roles of this voltage dependency, its effect on neural activity, or its relevance to behaviour? Recently, we showed that M1R voltage dependence is crucial for its recruitment. Not only that under physiological conditions, in vivo, M1R could not be activated without depolarization, depolarization alone was sufficient to activate M1R. Furthermore, flies with a voltage independent M1R had increased odor habituation indicating a paramount effect on behavior. These findings are pivotal in our thinking on GPCR recruitment and activity. However, to create a real paradigm shift, we need to unravel whether GPCR voltage dependence has a role in other types of GPCRs and neuronal processes. The fly is an ideal model system to explore GPCR voltage dependence roles because it has a low variety of receptors with no functional overlap. In particular, the Drosophila dopaminergic and muscarinic receptors that are highly expressed in the olfactory system seem ideal. I will use a multidisciplinary approach of electrophysiology, two-photon imaging, genetics, and behaviour to examine GPCR voltage dependency and means to manipulate it, unravel these GPCR physiological roles, and examine whether abolishing GPCR voltage dependence affects neuronal activity and behavioural output. The understanding that there is a “voltage rheostat” that controls GPCR activity will open an entirely new field of research and can serve for new therapeutic intervention.

Keywords: gpcr voltage dependence drosophila olfactory learning and memory
Food in Transition from Venice to Nuremberg: Identifying Food Trends in Premodern Times (13th-17th century) (FiT)

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: Social Sciences and Humanities
Countries involved: Italy
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2024 (HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01, 2024)
Start date: 2026-04-01
End date: 2028-03-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 209483.28
EU funding (EUR): 209483.28
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Using the term “food trends” may seem to suggest a postmodern era in which people seek individuality, even in their eating habits, and new trends are emerging all the time. This project, however, focuses on the past and aims to reveal and to identify food trends in the premodern era. The modern concept of “food trends” allows us to use selected products and to show how certain foreign/novel foods, made available through trade, changed the taste and appearance of familiar dishes, or gave rise to new food creations, food trends already in the premodern era. The project is centred on the Italian-German region and the trading hubs of Venice and Nuremberg from the 13th to the 17th century. In addition to the sources that document the economic exchange between these two cities (such as commercial books, trade monopolies, documents), the associated circulation of knowledge through philosophical writings and medical treatises, the dissemination of religious ideas, and the implementation of new products in everyday culinary life (in cookery books) are of interest. These provide insight into and discussion about food as it was in transition. Three objects – pasta, saffron and Malvasia wine – are used to illustrate food trends as they move from south to north. By doing so, the concept of “food trends” is defined and a new socio-cultural food history is created, incorporating aspects of medical and philosophical history as well as global and economic history and recognising the everyday historical dimension of nutrition, to which gender, social and religious aspects are added as important categories of analysis in this project.

Keywords: food history,history of mobilities exchange,travelling goods,cultural history,global history,food culture,medieval and premodern times,venice,nuremberg,italian german history
GROUP MINDS IN ANCIENT NARRATIVE (GROUPMINDS)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Texts and Concepts
Panel description: Literary studies , literature,  philosophy
Countries involved: Cyprus
Call: ERC STARTING GRANTS (ERC-2023-STG, 2023)
Start date: 2024-01-01
End date: 2028-12-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1494750.0
EU funding (EUR): 1494750.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Social cognition is a crucial category of both life and narratives. We read stories about people who engage in social interactions, act on shared emotions and thoughts, and often view themselves as part of specific groups. But how does narrative representation of collective consciousness serve as a mode of coming to grips with everyday social and distributed cognition? My project aims to build a bridge between narrative theory and a phenomenological take on cognition as socially extended and distributed among a set of individuals, in order to provide new answers as to the question of narrative’s function in humans' understanding of the social world. Ancient literature offers precious material for such an approach. The research hypothesis of this project is that Greek and Latin narratives thematise processes of group cognition in ways hitherto undetected, and that a detailed analysis of these processes offers new insights over the way narrative cognitively affects both reading experience and real-life experience of intersubjectivity. In order to be able to test this hypothesis, the project adopts an interdisciplinary methodology that brings together structuralist narratology, cognitive narrative studies, and research on social cognition in philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive sciences. It envisages the following objectives: (1) to analyse the techniques by which group minds and intermentality are narrativised, and thus offer the first narratology of collectives; (2) to investigate the cognitive responses which are evoked in the audiences during story reading; and (3) to illuminate the ways and extent that thinking about collective narrative minds feeds into thinking about human minds, cognitive interaction, and intersubjectivity in the real world. The project offers a groundbreaking contribution to the narratological analysis of (ancient) texts, the study of narrative’s social, cognitive and psychological effects on reader, the history of social cognition, and all disciplines that study group minds.

Keywords: ancient greek and latin literature,literary theory,narratology,cognitive narratology,group cognition,social cognition
AI-powered self-learning robots for high-performance waste valorization and critical raw materials recovery (iBot4CRMs)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness
Programme: Digital, Industry and Space
Theme: Digital
Destination: Digital & Emerging Technologies for Competitiveness and Fit for the Green Deal
Action type: Innovation actions
Partnership: AI-DATA-ROBOTICS (co-programmed)
Countries involved: Norway,Spain,Portugal,Türkiye,Greece,United Kingdom,Netherlands,Austria
Call: Industrial leadership in AI, Data and Robotics boosting competitiveness and the green transition (AI Data and Robotics Partnership) (IA)[[https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2021/662906/IPOL_STU(2021)662906_EN.pdf]] (HORIZON-CL4-2024-DIGITAL-EMERGING-01, 2024)
Start date: 2024-12-01
End date: 2028-11-30
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 9558276.25
EU funding (EUR): 8029445.13
Participants: 18
Project status: SIGNED

iBot4CRMs is devoted to develop and pilot a self-learning robot integrating novel AI tools, data models and meticulous manipulations to enable recovery of critical raw materials (CRMs) from urban waste and dismantling end of life products. Wastes are manually sorted today by trained staff to remove hazardous materials before incineration and recover CRMs and magnets from crashed cars, electric motors, electronic waste and home appliances after manual dismantling. Current sorting machines face limitations in separating tons/hour of waste flow in only three streams maximum as they are not able to deal with large variability in waste such that effectivity still depends on heavy manual sorting. iBot4CRMs aims to build sorting robots that encompass handcrafting and intelligence to support human work in managing the unmanageable of recovering CRMs from urban waste in real-time. The robot system will integrate solutions that are re-usable from other sectors to converge senso-mechanical perception with evolutionary learning and flexible manipulation in a responsible research and innovation for effective dismantling and precise picking of CRMs from waste to improve circularity and impact on securing critical value chains for Europe. iBot4CRMs addresses four large scale pilots for recovery of CRMs in reals-settings at large end-users and industries in Spain, Portugal, Greece and Turkey, each of them comprising several technological validation scenarios, and facilitates collaboration between small and large companies towards enabling the scalability and wider exploitation of results. The project targets CRMs of high impact/volume in waste such as recovery and recycling of neodymium magnets by dismantling motors as well as recovering selected CRMs and removing hazardous materials by effective robot picking. iBot4CRMs has not only high scientific impact with such a technology that does exist today but will also open for opportunities to meet circularity and resilience in Europe.

Keywords: dismantling,waste sorting,critical raw materials recovery
Discovering a new family of hypermodified antimicrobial peptides from marine tunicates and exploring their potential applications (TuniPeps)

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: Life Sciences
Countries involved: Italy
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2023 (HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01, 2023)
Start date: 2025-02-01
End date: 2027-01-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 188590.08
EU funding (EUR): 188590.08
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

The spread of antimicrobial resistance among human pathogenic bacteria and fungi is a major global and European concern, urgently necessitating the development of novel antibiotics. Another unsolved global healthcare problem is the burden of infections acquired through invasive medical devices. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) could be the solution to both problems, but they are currently limited by high cost, insufficient efficacy and stability as well as restricted chemical options for biotechnological production. However, in a group of marine animals: tunicates, there is a major, poorly characterized superfamily of AMPs with many advantageous natural chemical modifications. These unusual post-translational modifications (tryptophan bromination, arginine/lysine mono- and dihydroxylation, tyrosine hydroxylation, C-terminal amidation/oxidation) are predicted to improve potency and stability of the mature AMPs and might enable their efficient immobilization onto various surfaces. The latter property could also prove useful for surface coatings. In the current project, we aim to explore these promising bioproducts, from predictions by bioinformatics, through isolation of animal tissues, extraction and enrichment of the actual peptides, to their chemical analysis by mass spectrometry and testing of antimicrobial potency and safety. Project TuniPeps gives a major opportunity to both the applicant and host, to combine their complementary knowledge and skills in order to identify useful natural products from marine animals, acting as blueprints for future antimicrobials. These diverse molecules and their biosynthetic apparatus might also unlock cheap biotechnological production of novel molecules in the near future.

Keywords: natural product discovery,antimicrobials,post translational modifications
Standardized real-time perfusion assessment during fluorescence-guided surgery (GUIDESTAR)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Innovative Europe
Programme: The European Innovation Council (EIC)
Theme: EIC Accelerator
Destination: Other destinations
Action type: EIC actions
Countries involved: Denmark
Call: EIC Accelerator 2024 - Short application (HORIZON-EIC-2024-ACCELERATOR-01, 2024)
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2479750.0
EU funding (EUR): 2479750.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

310M major surgical procedures are performed every year. Despite strong medical progress, bleeding-related complications still occur in one third of surgeries, skyrocketing hospitalization costs up to ~30% and totaling incremental costs >€300Bn/year in EU and US alone. Perfusion assessment and blood vessel identification during surgery are the paramount approach in preventing bleeding-related complications and therefore reduce economic and societal costs. Fluorescence-guided surgery – a technique relying on light emission from specific fluorophores to track blood vessels and quantify tissue perfusion – takes a leading role in improving surgical precision and decision-making. However, its implementation is still subjective, non-standardized and non-quantitative. Therefore, there is a strong market need for real-time, continuous, and standardized perfusion assessment during FGS. Perfusion Tech is developing PerfusionWorks: a second-to-none hardware agnostic and stand-alone software that enables real-time, standardized, and continuous blood perfusion assessment during operative procedures through incorporation of unique Artificial Intelligence (AI) features. Our software is vertically and horizontally scalable across surgery and service types and will provide a unique cost-benefit value for all stakeholders. With EIC support, we will finalize AI and camera agnosticism features, and validate our software performance and economic benefits in reducing bleeding-related events through a health economic assessment anchored in a large multicenter clinical study. These activities will support regulatory submission under MDR (EU), and subsequent expansion into the US. On the other hand, EIC support for GUIDESTAR will potentiate strong economic and societal impact in the EU, reducing bleeding-related complications and strengthening the EU MedTech global presence.

Keywords: healthtech medtech ai algorithm machine learning neuronal networks indocyanine green surgical innovation
The influence of schools on the off-time transitions to parenthood and partnership (SchoolandTransitions)

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: Social Sciences and Humanities
Countries involved: Netherlands
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2021 (HORIZON-MSCA-2021-PF-01, 2021)
Start date: 2022-06-01
End date: 2025-08-31
Duration (months): 39.0
Total project cost (EUR): 211670.74
EU funding (EUR): 211670.74
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Becoming a parent and moving in to live with a partner are major life events determining individual’s life chances and outcomes. Transitioning to parenthood and partnership at very young age (also called off-time transitions), have been linked to adverse outcomes along the life course. A potentially key influence on off-time transition to parenthood and partnership are secondary schools and classmates, as adolescents spend a large part of their time in school, surrounded by their peers. Project SchoolandTransitions will be the first to investigate the role of secondary schools and classmates in off-time transitions to parenthood and partnership. This project aims to gain a complex understanding of the influence of schools and classmates and its interaction with individuals’ characteristics and family backgrounds. To achieve this, I set three objectives: (1) decompose the effect of the school as a social context and the effect of peer influence of classmates; (2) examine if and how can classmates and school contexts mitigate or exacerbate the influence of family background; and (3) assess how the effect of classmates and school contexts changes over the years since leaving the secondary school.

Keywords: parenthood partnership formation life events,school social influence adolescence
Intelligent Optoacoustic Radiomics via Synergistic Integration of System Models and Medical Knowledge (EchoLux)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment 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: Germany
Call: ERC STARTING GRANTS (ERC-2021-STG, 2021)
Start date: 2022-07-01
End date: 2027-06-30
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1499976.25
EU funding (EUR): 1499976.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Radiomics - the extraction of clinically relevant information from complex medical imaging data via mathematics and data science - is on the verge of becoming a main player in clinical research and medicine. However, the current radiomics workflow mostly relies on feature engineering and black box machine learning, lagging behind the state-of-the-art in explainable artificial intelligence. I will exploit my broad expertise in mathematics, informatics, and biomedical imaging to implement intelligent radiomics by integrating the whole imaging value chain - ranging from imaging hardware, over image formation, to medical interpretation of the data - into an intelligent software environment. EchoLux is a paradigm shift from black box machine learning to truly intelligent radiomics. EchoLux will be realized in three steps: 1) Modelling the imaging system via a digital twin approach using dedicated physical phantom data and a reference dataset acquired from healthy volunteers; 2) Development and integration of a medical knowledge base that captures the effects of disease on the imaged tissue; 3) Integration of system and medical tissue models into a Bayesian reasoning framework that is able to perform explainable diagnostics and medical knowledge discovery. The clinical use case is optoacoustic imaging of peripheral neuropathy. I recently demonstrated that the internal structure and vascular supply of peripheral nerves can be visualized in unprecedented detail by exploiting the molecular contrast of optoacoustic imaging. The EchoLux approach, thus, has the potential to enable early detection of pathological changes in peripheral nerves, e.g., in conjunction with diabetes. EchoLux links the clinical imaging data simultaneously back to the hardware and forward to the medical decision making. This holistic and interdisciplinary approach will leverage radiomics in general and boost the clinical value of optoacoustic imaging.

Keywords: optoacoustic imaging,photoacoustic imaging,radiomics,neuropathy
Assessing childRen manIpulation and Exploration skiLls (ARIEL)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Proof of concept grants
Action type: ERC actions
Countries involved: Italy
Call: ERC PROOF OF CONCEPT GRANTS (ERC-2024-POC, 2024)
Start date: 2025-05-01
End date: 2026-10-31
Duration (months): 18.0
Total project cost (EUR): 150000.0
EU funding (EUR): 150000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Investigating object manipulation is crucial for the comprehension of child development and the early assessment of sensorimotor impairments. However, no current available methods allow a complete and widespread characterization of the process: (i) they do not measure all the core components of manipulation, such as the object motion and the forces applied; (ii) they are too expensive due to the cost of the devices or the need of expert annotators; (iii) they are not designed for children. ARIEL (Assessing childRen manIpulation and Exploration skiLls) aims to develop myCube (multisensory Cube) a tool enabling quantitative assessment of object manipulation, designed to be engaging for children and accessible at low cost, both for neurotypical children and those with neurological and developmental disorders. MyCube is a lightweight sensorized cube measuring its orientation in space and the position and pressure of tactile contact points on its faces. It produces vibratory and auditory feedback and presents raised patterns on the surface, which can be haptically explored. The myCube design allows for easy customization of the stimulation, with a simple way of substituting the patterned silicon faces. Stemming from the promising results of the ERC wHiSPER project in the assessment of individual haptic exploration, ARIEL will: (i) develop the myCube device, software, and haptic assessment procedures; (ii) validate its effectiveness in a large cohort of school-aged healthy children and a group of children with cerebral palsy in collaboration with expert clinicians, and (iii) plan a feasible market implementation to maximize its impact. The resulting myCube kit, composed of two myCubes, the software for data analysis, and the haptic assessment testing procedure, will represent a holistic tool including all the desired features for a low-cost, non-invasive, precise, and customizable assessment of children’s haptic skills in manipulation.