Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
MicroRNA functions in single cells (miRCell)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Integrative Biology: from Genes and Genomes to Systems
Panel description: Genetics, epigenetics, genomics and other ‘omics studies, bioinformatics, systems biology, genetic diseases, gene editing, innovative methods and modelling, ‘omics for personalised medicine
Countries involved: Sweden
Call: ERC Starting Grant (ERC-2017-STG, 2017)
Start date: 2018-03-01
End date: 2023-02-28
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1497650.02
EU funding (EUR): 1497650.02
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

It is now becoming apparent that genes are regulated not only by transcription, but also by thousands of post-transcriptional regulators that can stabilize or degrade mRNAs. Some of the most important regulators are miRNAs, short RNA molecules that are deeply conserved in sequence and are involved in numerous biological processes, including human disease. Surprisingly, transcriptomic and proteomic studies show that most miRNAs only have subtle silencing effects on their targets, suggesting additional important, but yet undiscovered functions. Thus the question is raised: if the main function of miRNAs is not to silence targets, what is it? I will test two novel hypotheses about miRNA function. The first hypothesis proposes that miRNAs can buffer gene expression noise. The second hypothesis is inspired by my preliminary results and proposes that miRNAs can synchronize expression of genes. If I validate either hypothesis, it would mean that miRNA functions can be investigated in entirely new ways, yielding important new biological insights relevant to both basic research and human health. However, these hypotheses can only be tested in individual cells, and the necessary single-cell technologies and computational tools are only maturing now. I will apply my expertise in miRNA biology and in combined wet-lab and computational methods to design, develop and apply miRCell-seq to test these two hypotheses in cell cultures and in animals. This new method will for the first time measure miRNAs, their targets, and the interactions between them in single cells and transcriptome-wide. We will use mutant cells devoid of miRNAs and time course experiments to generate sufficient data to develop detailed models of the miRNA impact on their targets. We will then validate our findings with single cell proteomics. This project thus has the potential to reveal novel functions of miRNAs and substantially improve our general understanding of gene regulation.

Keywords: mirna biology,single cell functional genomics
A Next Generation Immunotherapy for Human Papilloma Virus induced Cervical Cancer (IMMUNISA)

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,Belgium,Belgium,Netherlands,Netherlands,United Kingdom
Call: New therapies for chronic diseases (H2020-SC1-2016-RTD, 2016)
Start date: 2017-12-01
End date: 2022-11-30
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 5999999.5
EU funding (EUR): 5999999.5
Participants: 6
Project status: CLOSED

Cervical cancer (CxCa) is caused by high risk types of the human papillomavirus (a.o. HPV16). Prophylactic HPV vaccination is not the standard of care in all European countries, and where approved it is not sufficiently adopted. Once infected, these vaccines no longer prevent premalignant lesions and CxCa, which can only be treated with surgery or radio-chemotherapy. However, this is not effective in recurrent/advanced CxCa. In underdeveloped countries, CxCa is often detected when it is too late for curative treatment. With an estimated global incidence of 500.000 new cases of CxCa and 274.000 deaths per year, the need for an effective therapy is extremely high. Targeted immunotherapy is an effective approach to induce a tumour-directed immune response. Previously, members of the IMMUNISA consortium have formulated ISA101, a cancer vaccine consisting of overlapping synthetic long peptides covering all epitopes of the HPV16 oncogenic proteins. ISA101 has shown promising Phase 1 clinical trial results in patients with advanced CxCa where it works synergistically with chemotherapy. IMMUNISA now proposes the multi-centre randomised Phase 2 CervISA-2 trial; a careful assessment of the efficacy of the proprietary ISA101b therapeutic vaccine in combination with chemotherapy for the treatment of CxCa, measured by a prolonged progression free survival. A multidisciplinary collaboration between leading clinical EU sites specialised in CxCa, a partner providing strategic and operational regulatory service and a cutting-edge biotech SME will enable the optimal implementation of the CervISA-2 trial, exploitation activities and overall project dissemination. This is pivotal to catapult further development of ISA101b as a commercial vaccine and push it towards clinical implementation as fast as possible. For ISA101b, IMMUNISA will provide, 1) clinical data on the efficacy, 2) a solid exploitation strategy and 3) the regulatory framework for efficient translation to clinical use.

Keywords: human papillomavirus,type16,cervical cancer,immunotherapy,synthetic long peptides,phase 2 clinical trial
Study of the Planetary Human-Environment Relationship: The Rise of Global Environmental Governance (SPHERE)

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: Sweden
Call: ERC Advanced Grant (ERC-2017-ADG, 2017)
Start date: 2018-10-01
End date: 2024-06-30
Duration (months): 69.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2568125.0
EU funding (EUR): 2500000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

SPHERE is a historical study of humanity’s relation to planetary conditions and constraints and how it has become understood as a governance issue. The key argument is that Global Environmental Governance (GEG), which has arisen in response to this issue, is inseparable from the rise of a planetary Earth systems science and a knowledge-informed understanding of global change that has affected broad communities of practice. The overarching objective is to provide a fundamentally new perspective on GEG that challenges both previous linear, progressivist narratives through incremental institutional work and the way contemporary history is written and understood. SPHERE will be implemented as an expressly global history along four Trajectories, which will ensure both transnational as well as transdisciplinary analysis of GEG as a major contemporary phenomenon. Trajectory I: Formation articulates a proto-history of GEG after 1945 when the concept of ‘the environment’ in its new integrative meaning was established and a slow formation of policy ideas and institutions could start. Trajectory II: The complicated turning of environmental research into governance investigates the relation between environmental science and environmental governance which SPHERE examines as an open ended historical process. Why was it that high politics and diplomacy came in closer relations with environmental sciences? Trajectory III: Alternative agencies – governance through business and civic society explores corporate responses, including self-regulation through the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility, to growing concerns about environmental degradation and pollution, and business-science relations. Trajectory IV: Integrating Earth into History – scaling, mediating, remembering will turn to historiography itself and examine how concepts and ideas from the rising Earth system sciences have been influencing both GEG and the way we think historically about Earth and humanity.
The Qur’an as a Source for Late Antiquity (QaSLA)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Cultures and cultural production
Panel description: Literary studies, cultural studies, study of the arts, philosophy
Countries involved: Germany,United Kingdom
Call: ERC Consolidator Grant (ERC-2019-COG, 2019)
Start date: 2020-10-01
End date: 2025-09-30
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1969101.0
EU funding (EUR): 1900268.0
Participants: 2
Project status: SIGNED

The Qur’an’s message to the populations of Mecca and Medina can only be fully understood in the context of its sustained and critical engagement with the Jewish and the Christian traditions. QaSLA complements and redevelops this approach from the ground up by utilizing the Qur’an across disciplines as witness to the history of Judaism and Christianity. Its innovation is twofold. The Qur’an, firstly, will become the primary literary source allowing us to sketch the religious landscape of the Arabian Peninsula, for which no comparable late antique witness exists. Secondly, the Qur’an’s testimony to the religious culture of its contemporaries will enable us to approach the development of Jewish and Christian traditions throughout Late Antiquity from a new perspective. QaSLA’s main innovation consists in turning the table on the predominant hermeneutics of Western approaches to the Qur’an, which tend to focus on the question of how the Qur’an is influenced by Judaism and Christianity. By taxonomizing the religious profiles reflected in the demonstrable interface between the Qur’an and its Jewish and Christian contemporaries, the project first reorients and then revamps this approach. QaSLA initially analyses the affinity between the Qur’an and known forms of Judaism and Christianity surrounding Arabia in order to identify which biblical, exegetical, homiletic, legal, narrative, ritual, and poetic discourses and practices circulated within the peninsula. It then employs the Qur’an as a new vantage point from which to reconsider broader late antique religious trends across the Middle East. QaSLA combines expertise across disciplines to create a novel local Arabian and an enhanced longitudinal Middle Eastern understanding of Rabbinic Jewish and Syriac, Ethiopic and Arabic Christian cultures. In a final step, the project then returns to portray the Qur’an in sharper contradistinction to more clearly defined forms of Judaism and Christianity.

Keywords: islam,judaism,christianity,late antiquity,religious studies,islamic studies,arabia,middle east
How to best meet the needs of people with dementia with severe behavioural disturbances. Toward a respectful and cost-effective model (RECAGE)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Societal Challenges
Programme: Health, demographic change and wellbeing
Theme: Treating and managing disease
Action type: Research and Innovation actions
Countries involved: Italy,Germany,Germany,Italy,Italy,Italy,Italy,Italy,Greece,Greece,Switzerland,Norway,Belgium,France,France,Netherlands
Call: Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases (GACD) prevention and management of mental disorders (H2020-SC1-2017-Single-Stage-RTD, 2017)
Start date: 2018-01-01
End date: 2023-06-30
Duration (months): 66.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2824037.5
EU funding (EUR): 2824037.5
Participants: 20
Project status: SIGNED

The RECAGE project will tackle one of the most challenging problem arising during the clinical course of dementia: the so-called Behavioural and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia (BPSD). The current state-of-the-art of the treatment of these symptoms is still unsatisfactory and there are many unmet needs in this area. The major objective of the project will be to assess the effectiveness of an intervention, the special medical care unit for patients with BPSD (SCU-B), that, albeit already implemented in some European countries, is not widespread and has not been sufficiently studied so far, although it seems to be promising for its short-term efficacy (alleviating BPSD and improving quality of life of PwD) and possibly for its long term efficacy. In order to achieve this goal, RECAGE will proceed in three steps: 1) A prospective cohort study, comparing the activity of the centres endowed with a typical SCU-B with that of the other participating centres lacking this facility; the efficacy and the cost-effectiveness of the proposed intervention will be tested in the prospective study. The expected benefits are socially appreciable: improving quality of life of persons with dementia, lessening caregivers' burden, possibly delaying institutionalisation 2) A conference aiming at adapting the SCU-B model in accordance with the results of the cohort study, not only regarding its main endpoints, but also comparing the experience and the different ways of operating of the participating centres and the different socio-political context in which they act 3) A plan for scaling up the intervention in the countries who take part in the study, but where SCU-Bs are absent or sporadic as Italy and Greece.

Keywords: dementia,behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia,special care unit for dementia,cost effectiveness,non pharmacologic therapies,atypical antipsychotics,ethics of physical restraints
Exploitation of Exascale Systems for Open-Source Computational Fluid Dynamics by Mainstream Industry (exaFOAM)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Industrial Leadership
Programme: Information and Communication Technologies
Theme: Public-private partnerships
Destination: European High Performance Computing
Action type: Innovation actions
Partnership: EuroHPC (Art-187)
Countries involved: Germany,Germany,Italy,Spain,Italy,Germany,Germany,Italy,Greece,Croatia,France,Portugal,United Kingdom
Call: Industrial software codes for extreme scale computing environments and applications (H2020-JTI-EuroHPC-2019-1, 2019)
Start date: 2021-04-01
End date: 2024-03-31
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 5425618.75
EU funding (EUR): 2401804.61
Participants: 15
Project status: SIGNED

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has become a mature technology in engineering design, contributing strongly to industrial competitiveness and sustainability across a wide range of sectors (e.g. transportation, power generation, disaster prevention). Future growth depends upon the exploitation of massively parallel HPC architectures, however this is currently hampered by performance scaling bottlenecks. The ambitious exaFOAM project aims to overcome these limitations through the development and validation of a range of algorithmic improvements. Improvements across the entire CFD process chain (pre-processing, simulation, I/O, post-processing) will be developed. Effectiveness will be demonstrated via a suite of HPC Grand Challenge and Industrial Application Challenge cases. All developments will be implemented in the open-source CFD software OpenFOAM, one of the most successful open-source projects in the area of computational modelling, with a large industrial and academic user base. To ensure success, the project mobilises a highly-capable consortium consisting of experts in HPC, CFD algorithms and industrial applications and includes universities, HPC centres, code release authorities and SMEs. Project management will be facilitated by a clear project structure and quantified objectives enable tracking of the project progress. Special emphasis will be placed on ensuring a strong impact of the exaFOAM project. The project has been conceived to address all expected impacts set out in the Work Programme. All developed code and validation cases will be released as open-source to the community in coordination with the OpenFOAM Governance structure. The involvement of 17 industrial supporters and stakeholders from outside the consortium underscores the industrial relevance of the project outcomes. A well-structured and multi-channelled plan for dissemination and exploitation of the project outcomes further reinforces the expected impact.

Keywords: exascale openfoam hpc parallel io cfd algorithms
Understanding and controlling the spatial organisation of cancer (CAN_ORGANISE)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Advanced grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Panel description: Organ and tissue physiology, comparative physiology, physiology of ageing, pathophysiology, interorgan and tissue communication, endocrinology, nutrition, metabolism, interaction with the microbiome, non-communicable diseases including cancer (and except disorders of the nervous system and immunity-related diseases)
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call: ERC ADVANCED GRANT (ERC-2020-ADG, 2020)
Start date: 2021-10-01
End date: 2026-09-30
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2500000.0
EU funding (EUR): 2500000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

The spatial of organisation of tumours is the cumulative result of a myriad of cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions. These interactions determine the shape and relative positions of cells and the deposition and structure of the extracellular matrix (ECM), which feeds back to guide cell migration. The spatial patterns of tumours indirectly encode information about the likely future course of the disease, which is interpreted by pathologists to provide patient prognosis. To understand and control the spatial organisation of tumours requires not just knowledge of cell position, but of the underlying structural matrix. Furthermore, analysis of fixed tissues fails to capture information about cell movement or the relative sequence and kinetics of events. We will place both structural information about the ECM and dynamic analysis obtained through longitudinal intravital imaging and the centre of our work. We will focus on sequentially describing, understanding, and then re-configuring the spatial organisation of the tumour microenvironment. We will develop spatial metrics to analyse stromal architecture and link spatial features to disease outcomes in patient cohorts and therapy responses in intravital imaging studies. Reductionist co-culture assays and microfabricated tools will be used to study the mechanisms of cell-cell and cell-matrix crosstalk that generate spatial patterns. This analysis will be coupled to an agent-based computational model, parameterised using our experimental models, to explore both emergent pattern formation and possible mechanisms of interconversion between spatial patterns. Both experimental and modelling approaches will be used to identify effective mechanisms to control spatial patterns in breast and skin cancer models. Finally, interventional approaches will be adopted to re-organise the spatial architecture of the tumour stroma into patterns that favour effective therapy and tumour elimination.

Keywords: tumour microenvironment,stromal fibroblast
Tuning emission of charged excitons in two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers (2DCHEX)

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-2020, 2020)
Start date: 2021-07-01
End date: 2023-06-30
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 207312.0
EU funding (EUR): 207312.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) monolayers constitute an attractive material platform due to additional degrees of freedom in encoding and processing quantum information. Currently, the use of these degrees of freedom in valleytronics is hampered due to the low valley polarization of the neutral exciton at room temperature. Recently, charged excitons have been demonstrated to exhibit high valley polarization even at room temperature albeit with low quantum yield and have a need for sophisticated charge doping techniques. This action proposes a novel electro-optical interface based on electron doping of TMD monolayers. I suggest to use the electric double layers to control the formation of charged excitons, and to use complex nanoantennas to enhance and collimate generated emission. My goal is to develop a quantum device merging fields of electrochemistry, photonics, plasmonics and TMD materials, giving practical access to new degrees of freedom for future valleytronic applications. The objectives are to demonstrate the exciton charging in TMD monolayers using a custom-built electrochemical cell and to tune electrically charged-exciton emission through the manipulation of the Fermi level, i.e., chemical potential. I aim to use the tuning of emission energy for coupling the charged exciton with a narrow resonance of a complex nanoantenna. This antenna will increase the extraction efficiency by directing the emission of charged excitons and enhancing their generation rate. Furthermore, I aim to explore the chirality of valley polarization and address the emission of charged excitons for their directional coupling with plasmons in high quality wedge waveguides based on crystalline gold micro-flakes. The overarching aim of my action is the development of a novel bright, directional, and electrically tunable quantum emitting device operating at room temperature for future quantum computing and information technologies.

Keywords: charged exciton,trion,transition metal dichalcogenides,spectroelectrochemistry,electrical tuning,charge doping,circular polarisation,valleytronics,optical antenna,plasmonic waveguide