Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Improved Vaccination Strategies for Older Adults (ISOLDA)

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,Spain,Spain,Germany,Netherlands,Netherlands
Call: Stratified host-directed approaches to improve prevention, treatment and/or cure of infectious diseases (H2020-SC1-2019-Two-Stage-RTD, 2019)
Start date: 2020-01-01
End date: 2024-12-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 6087314.25
EU funding (EUR): 6087314.25
Participants: 7
Project status: SIGNED

ISOLDA aims at the development of improved vaccines for older adults against viral diseases with highest burdens at old age, by promoting virus-specific T cell responses in vaccinees over 65 years, using modulators of T cell immunosenescence and inflammageing. It builds on leading interdisciplinary expertise and knowledge of ISOLDA partners in virology, (onco-)immunology, ageing and immunosenescence, to assess the potential of immunomodulators, including kinase inhibitors licenced for other human use, to improve vaccine-induced immune responses and safety in older adults. ISOLDA partners have shown that these compounds may indeed restore key immunosenescent signatures. They will investigate ex-vivo signatures of immunological ageing and restoring potential of selected compounds on vaccine-induced immune responses against influenza virus, using PBMC from past and on-going adult and ageing human cohorts of influenza vaccinees. Cohorts of vaccinees and/or patients for tick-borne encephalitis, Middle-East respiratory syndrome and yellow fever are also uniquely available to ISOLDA to demonstrate broad applicability of the approach. The most promising compounds will be tested in in-vivo animal models for vaccination against these diseases. As a clinical proof of concept, ISOLDA will aim at improving efficacy of current seasonal influenza vaccines up to a tiered phase I clinical trial with a lead immunomodulator compound selected from the ex vivo and in vivo studies, that will be added to current vaccine formulations. ISOLDA will further build on new generation vaccines against MERS, such as replication-competent propagation-deficient replicons and MVA-MERS S recently developed by ISOLDA partners. Taken together, ISOLDA will address call SC1-BHC-14-2019, by providing innovative solutions to reduced efficacy and safety of preventive vaccines in the increasing population of older adults, against viral infections that have the highest impact in this age group.

Keywords: vaccines,emerging and re emerging viruses,influenza virus,tbev,yellow fever virus,mers cov,growing ageing population,immunosenescence,inflammaging,adjuvant,existing cohorts,humanized mice
Enhancing data fusion, parallelisation for hydrological modelling and estimating sensitivity to spatial parameterization of SWAT to model nitrogen and phosphorus runoff at local and global scale (GLOMODAT)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Individual Fellowships (IF)-Reintegration panel
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Panel: Environment and Geosciences
Countries involved: Estonia
Call: Individual Fellowships (H2020-MSCA-IF-2017, 2017)
Start date: 2019-09-01
End date: 2021-08-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 148582.8
EU funding (EUR): 148582.8
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

A growing economy and population in the world is causing landscape changes and an increasing pressure is put on water resources. Diffuse water pollution is considered to be one of the major problems for water quality in many countries. Modelling has been successfully used to simulate water quality in catchments to better understand the underlying landscape processes. The widely used Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) is a spatially distributed model that can be used to estimate flow and nutrient transport at a variety of scales. In current published studies typically only one or two parameters of precipitation, DEM, land use or soil properties are used in. The proposed project aims to investigate how spatial resolution of core input datasets of all types (precipitation, DEM, land use and soil) impacts SWAT modelling results and estimate the nutrient runoff on a local and global scale. Sensitivity analysis to all of precipitation, DEM, land use and soil will therefore be tested. The limitation to one or two parameters in current published studies is due to the computational demands. Due to the way the SWAT model is programmed using a tightly coupled Message Passing Interface (MPI) approaches the available computing power needs to accessible within specialised High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters of limited size. Thus, either scale or resolution is typically compromised. As for higher resolution or global scale data the computational effort becomes too large for automated calibration, we aim to develop a novel method to automate data processing and balancing computational load transparently between many computers. In order to surpass these limitations we test the MapReduce framework as a novel method for parallelization. This entails new ways of data management, model data partitioning and spreading the model partition computations transparently over multiple computing nodes fostering a loosely coupled distributed computation paradigm.

Keywords: water quality modelling,nutrients,water management,scientific computing,ogc standards
Dynamic Nuclear Polarization at ultra-fast sample spinning and ultra-low temperature (ULT-MAS-DNP)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Panel description: Analytical chemistry, chemical theory, physical chemistry/chemical physics
Countries involved: France
Call: ERC Consolidator Grant (ERC-2015-CoG, 2015)
Start date: 2016-07-01
End date: 2021-06-30
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1999805.42
EU funding (EUR): 1959805.42
Participants: 2
Project status: CLOSED

The goal of the project is to develop a new hyperpolarization approach called Magic Angle Spinning Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (MAS-DNP) to reach levels of sensitivity and resolution that have never been achieved, in order to tackle highly relevant chemical and biological questions that remain unanswered so far. Firstly this will provide major advances in NMR crystallography (solving 3D structures by NMR) by showing that distance measurements between nuclei (13C, 15N, etc.) as well as 17O quadrupolar parameters can be extracted from NMR measurements without requiring isotopic labeling. This will be applied to systems that cannot be easily isotopically enriched and for which X-ray analysis is often not suitable. Secondly we propose an innovative strategy to hyperpolarize nuclear spins using MAS-DNP: rather than polarizing the entire system uniformly, we will selectively “light up” regions where we wish to gather important structural information. This will be developed to study protein-ligand interactions (with unprecedented resolution) to answer specific structural questions and potentially impact the field of drug engineering. Finally we will show that the unique experimental setup developed in this project will open up NMR to the routine study of “exotic”, yet ubiquitous and highly informative, nuclei such as 43Ca and 67Zn. Specifically, we will show that MAS-DNP can become a choice technique for the study of diamagnetic metal binding sites, complementing EPR for the study of metalloproteins. These goals will be achieved thanks to the development of original methods and advanced instrumentation, allowing sustainable access to low temperatures (down to 10-20 K) and fast pneumatic sample spinning, under microwave irradiation. We expect to improve the current sensitivity to such an extent that 4 orders of magnitude of experimental timesavings are obtained, resulting in completely new research directions and regimes.
Brain barriers training (BtRAIN)

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: Germany,Germany,Italy,Italy,Germany,Switzerland,Belgium,Switzerland,Hungary,Switzerland,France,Netherlands,United States,Netherlands,United Kingdom
Call: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks (ITN-ETN) (H2020-MSCA-ITN-2015, 2015)
Start date: 2015-09-01
End date: 2019-08-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 3067402.32
EU funding (EUR): 3067402.3200000003
Participants: 20
Project status: CLOSED

The brain barriers function to protect the central nervous system (CNS) from neurotoxic compounds. By the same traits they unfortunately block delivery of drugs to the CNS thus hindering proper diagnosis and effective treatment of neurological disorders including Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis. The unusual complexity of the brain barriers has severely hampered progress in the market of CNS targeting therapeutics. BtRAIN bridges this gap by creating particular knowledge on vertebrate brain barrier signature genes and their specific roles in regulating brain barrier function in development, health, ageing and disease. Brain barrier signature genes will be identified by combining cross-species and cross-system brain barrier transcriptome analysis with dedicated bioinformatics. These data will be made available for brain barrier datamining in the userfriendly online platform BBBHub. Within BtRAIN, the side-by-side comparison of a unique and broad armamentarium of different vertebrate in vitro and in vivo brain barrier models will allow to develop and validate particular in vitro brain barrier models that are suited to reliably predict brain barrier function in vivo. Combined with an accompanying in depth analysis of the pathological alterations of the brain barriers during neurological disorders BtRAIN will create unique knowledge to overcome the unmet need for the development of diagnostic and therapeutic tools able to breach the brain barriers. In BtRAIN 12 academic, 6 non-academic partners and 1 European network will jointly train young researchers at unique interfaces of brain barrier research, bioinformatics, business development and science communication for an international research or entrepreneur career. To create this expert pool is the motivation for the involved partners as it will advance the Euopean capacity to bring innovative approaches to the untapped potential of the CNS therapeutic market.

Keywords: blood brain barrier,bood cerebrospinal fluid barrier,cns drug delivery
The First Bantu Speakers South of the Rainforest: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Human Migration, Language Spread, Climate Change and Early Farming in Late Holocene Central Africa (BantuFirst)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: The study of the human past
Panel description: Archaeology, history and memory
Countries involved: Belgium,Belgium
Call: ERC Consolidator Grant (ERC-2016-COG, 2016)
Start date: 2018-01-01
End date: 2023-12-31
Duration (months): 72.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1997500.0
EU funding (EUR): 1960000.0
Participants: 2
Project status: SIGNED

The Bantu Expansion is not only the main linguistic, cultural and demographic process in Late Holocene Africa. It is also one of the most controversial issues in African History that still has political repercussions today. It has sparked debate across the disciplines and far beyond Africanist circles in an attempt to understand how the young Bantu language family (ca. 5000 years) could spread over large parts of Central, Eastern and Southern Africa. This massive dispersal is commonly seen as the result of a single migratory macro-event driven by agriculture, but many questions about the movement and subsistence of ancestral Bantu speakers are still open. They can only be answered through real interdisciplinary collaboration. This project will unite researchers with outstanding expertise in African archaeology, archaeobotany and historical linguistics to form a unique cross-disciplinary team that will shed new light on the first Bantu-speaking village communities south of the rainforest. Fieldwork is planned in parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo and Angola that are terra incognita for archaeologists to determine the timing, location and archaeological signature of the earliest villagers and to establish how they interacted with autochthonous hunter-gatherers. Special attention will be paid to archaeobotanical and palaeoenvironmental data to get an idea of their subsistence, diet and habitat. Historical linguistics will be pushed beyond the boundaries of vocabulary-based phylogenetics and open new pathways in lexical reconstruction, especially regarding subsistence and land use of early Bantu speakers. Through interuniversity collaboration archaeozoological, palaeoenvironmental and genetic data and phylogenetic modelling will be brought into the cross-disciplinary approach to acquire a new holistic view on the interconnections between human migration, language spread, climate change and early farming in Late Holocene Central Africa.

Keywords: central africa,bantu expansion,african history,archaeology,historical linguistics,archaeobotany,evolutionary genetics,palaeoenvironmental studies,interdisciplinarity
Intentional stance for social attunement (InStance)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Panel description: Cognitive science, psychology, linguistics, theoretical philosophy
Countries involved: Italy
Call: ERC Starting Grant (ERC-2016-STG, 2016)
Start date: 2017-05-01
End date: 2022-12-31
Duration (months): 68.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1499937.0
EU funding (EUR): 1499937.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

In daily social interactions, we constantly attribute mental states, such as beliefs or intentions, to other humans – to understand and predict their behaviour. Today we also routinely interact with artificial agents: from Apple’s Siri to GPS navigation systems. In the near future, we will casually interact with robots. However, since we consider artificial agents to have no mental states, we tend to not attune socially with them in the sense of activating our mechanisms of social cognition. This is because it seems pointless to socially attune to something that does not carry social meaning (mental content) under the surface of an observed behaviour. INSTANCE will break new ground in social cognition research by identifying factors that influence attribution of mental states to others and social attunement with humans or artificial agents. The objectives of INSTANCE are to (1) determine parameters of others’ behaviour that make us attribute mental states to them, (2) explore parameters relevant for social attunement, (3) elucidate further factors – culture and experience – that influence attribution of mental states to agents and, thereby social attunement. INSTANCE’s objectives are highly relevant not only for fundamental research in social cognition, but also for the applied field of social robotics, where robots are expected to become humans’ social companions. Indeed, if we do not attune socially to artificial agents viewed as mindless machines, then robots may end up not working well enough in contexts where interaction is paramount. INSTANCE’s unique approach combining cognitive neuroscience methods with real-time human-robot interaction will address the challenge of social attunement between humans and artificial agents. Subtle features of robot behaviour (e.g., timing or pattern of eye movements) will be manipulated. The impact of such features on social attunement (e.g., joint attention) will be examined with behavioural, neural and physiological measures.

Keywords: social neuroscience,human robot interaction,social robotics
Deciphering the function(s) of the C-type lectin DCIR/CLEC4A in tuberculosis (BREFMC2017)

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: France
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): 173076.0
EU funding (EUR): 173076.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Tuberculosis (TB), caused by the infectious agent Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), is a devastating disease and one of the leading causes of death in the developing world. Dendritic cells (DCs) play a key role in anti-mycobacterial immunity and express a range of pattern-recognition receptors which are involved in the recognition of Mtb antigens. Dr Olivier Neyrolles’ lab has characterised a number of these receptors, with the most recent being, and the focus of this project, the Dendritic Cell Immunoreceptor (DCIR). They have demonstrated that compared to wild-type mice, mice with a knockout in the DCIR homolog (mDCIR1) display increased antimycobacterial immunity as a result of an impaired response to type I interferon and an increased production of IL-12 in DCs. Consequently, mDCIR1-KO mice control Mtb better than their wild-type counterparts, but also develop increased lung inflammation. Based on these findings, it is hypothesised that DCIR is a key regulator of the balance between type I and type II interferon responses. The aim of this project is to implement a multidisciplinary strategy to investigate i) expression and function, ii) signalling, and iii) trafficking of DCIR in the context of Mtb infection. These studies will be focused on the aforementioned mDcir1 in addition to a second murine DCIR homolog mDCIR2, to evaluate the extent to which they play redundant or complementary roles in Mtb immunity. This will be accomplished using i) mDcir1- and mDcir2- KO mice to assess bacterial burden and the subsequent inflammatory response, ii) large-scale phosphoproteomics and transcriptomics to assess signalling events associated with DCIR-ligand binding, and iii) immunoelectron and immunofluorescence microscopy to examine the trafficking of the DCIR-ligand complex. This research will form a fundamental basis for the future exploitation of DCIR as an immunomodulatory checkpoint for the design of novel therapeutics aimed at reducing lung inflammation.

Keywords: tuberculosis,interferon response,dendritic cells,c type lectin receptor,th1 response
LOMID - Large cost-effective OLED microdisplays and their applications (LOMID)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Industrial Leadership
Programme: Information and Communication Technologies
Theme: A new generation of components and systems: Engineering of advanced embedded and energy and resource efficient components and systems
Action type: Research and Innovation actions
Countries involved: Germany,Germany,Spain,Germany,Switzerland,Malaysia,Switzerland,France,France,United Kingdom
Call: Advanced Thin, Organic and Large Area Electronics (TOLAE) technologies (H2020-ICT-2014-1, 2014)
Start date: 2015-01-01
End date: 2018-06-30
Duration (months): 42.0
Total project cost (EUR): 4100673.88
EU funding (EUR): 3993453.0
Participants: 11
Project status: CLOSED

The LOMID project will define pathways to the manufacture of flexible OLED microdisplays with an exceptionally large area (16 mm x 20 mm, screen diagonal of 25.4 mm) at acceptably high yields (>65%). This will be achieved by developing a robust silicon-based chip design allowing high pixel counts (1024x1280 (SXGA)) and high spatial resolution(pixel sizes of 10 µm x 10 µm corresponding to 2000 ppi). These display innovations will be coupled to a highly reliable manufacturing of the backplane. Cheap processes (e.g. based on 0.35 µm lithography) will be developed and special attention will be given to the interface between the top metal electrode of the CMOS backplane and the subsequent OLED layers. All these developments will be done on a 200 mm wafer scale. Along with this, a new testing procedure for quality control of the CMOS wafer (prior to OLED deposition) will be developed and promoted for standardisation. The flexibility of the large area microdisplays will be achieved by wafer thinning to enable a bending radius of 45 mm. Along with the new functionality, the durability of the devices has to be guaranteed despite bending to be comparable to rigid devices. The project will address this by improving the OLED efficiency (e.g. operating lifetime > 15,000 hours) and by modifying the device encapsulation to both fulfil the necessary barrier requirements (WVTR < 10^-6 g/d m2) and to give sufficient mechanical protection. The demand for and timeliness of these flexible, large area microdisplays is shown by the strong interest of industrial integrators to demonstrate the benefits of the innovative OLED microdisplays. Within the project, industrial integrators will validate the project’s microdisplays in smart glasses for virtual reality and to aid those with impaired vision.

Keywords: cmos backplanes,hybrid nano electronics