Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Magneto-elastic technologies for point-of-care diagnostics (MagElastic)

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,United Kingdom,United Kingdom
Call: FET Innovation Launchpad (H2020-FETOPEN-4-2016-2017, 2017)
Start date: 2018-10-01
End date: 2020-03-31
Duration (months): 18.0
Total project cost (EUR): 99581.66
EU funding (EUR): 99581.25
Participants: 3
Project status: CLOSED

The aim of MagElastic is to turn into a “ready for market” technology an innovation based on magnetoelastic micromotors, which was recently developed by FET-OPEN consortium ABIOMATER. It was demonstrated that such micromotors can function as microfluidic pumps, valves and stirrers, to manipulate liquids at microscopic scale. These properties show high potential in point-of-care (POC) diagnostics, since they allow for minimal volume of sample extraction, instantaneous application, and no reliance on the medical expertise or laboratory tools. The main objective of MagElastic is to set up a start-up/spin-off company for commercialising a blood plasma separation component which will enable to produce a range of point-of-care devices for diagnosis of many known illnesses. With only a prick of blood such a component can help saving a significant amount of time and costs, which are currently being lost in the necessity of involving specialised equipment and staff support to extract blood plasma. Because of it’s time efficiency, in some cases (such as Sepsis described below), such devices will allow to save lives. MagElastic will bring the current technology from TRL5/6 to TRL7 by engaging with early adopters that will test the new device in operational environment. Moreover MagElastic will pave the way for the commercialisation of the new device by meeting with potential customers, clients and commercial partners and facilitating access to potential investors. During the project, the University of Exeter and Platform Kinetics, owners of the results of the undergoing FET-OPEN project, will be supported by META Group, an experienced partner in exploitation of research results and access to investors.

Keywords: point of care diagnostics,microfluidic devices,lab on a chip technology,commercialisation roadmap,lean canvas,access to investors,start up,spin off creation
A novel environment-friendly limited space cooler for high volume food and beverage vending industries. (Home of Cool)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Societal Challenges
Programme: Climate action, environment,  resource efficiency and raw materials
Action type: SME instrument
Countries involved: Finland
Call: Boosting the potential of small businesses in the areas of climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials (H2020-SMEINST-2-2016-2017, 2017)
Start date: 2017-05-01
End date: 2019-04-30
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1610000.0
EU funding (EUR): 1127000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Home of Cool™ is a novel electronic and environment-friendly limited space cooler that does not use a compressor or a chemical refrigerant. Its target markets are POS (Point of Sales) and (Point of Purchase) vending cooler suppliers for big brands of food and beverage industries. Nordic 24/7 Services have passed Feasibility Study and Customer Development, and believe that Home of Cool™ will raise the Company’s profitability and grow its workforce. The project is feasible, viable, profitable and sustainable. Nordic 24/7 Services is seeking financing through SME Instrument to fund the transition of the TRL6 prototype into commercialisation.

Keywords: green,novel eco friendly cooler,zero landfill,recycling,sustainable,profitability,growth,disruptive
Human, Woven, Tissue-Engineered Blood Vessels (TEBV) Exclusively from Cell-Assembled Extracellular Matrix (CAM). (HUMAN TEXTILES)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Advanced grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Products and processes engineering
Panel description: Product and process design, chemical, civil, environmental, mechanical, vehicle engineering, energy processes and relevant computational methods
Countries involved: France
Call: ERC Advanced Grant (ERC-2017-ADG, 2017)
Start date: 2018-11-01
End date: 2024-10-31
Duration (months): 72.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2491543.0
EU funding (EUR): 2491543.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Synthetic vascular grafts perform very poorly in small diameter applications (coronary/peripheral bypass) and for dialysis access. Better vascular conduits for these applications would be life and limb-saving for a very large patient population. A biological, human, tissue-engineered blood vessel (TEBV) may be such a device. We have developed a method to produce robust sheets of cell-assembled extracellular matrix (CAM) from normal, adult, human fibroblasts in vitro. These have been rolled into TEBV and shown promising clinical results. However, this initial rolling approach is very costly, time consuming and has limited mechanical design potential. Here, we propose a new textile-based assembly method that can lift all these limitations. Task#1 will aim at processing CAM sheets into various types of yarns (human and large animal) and characterizing composition, organization, and mechanical properties. Task#2 will aim at quantifying the in vivo remodeling of the various yarns in nude rats (human yarn) and in an allogeneic recipient (large animal) as subcutaneous implants. This screening process will identify yarns with the best biological response and mechanical profiles. Task#3 will aim at weaving human and animal, non-living, TEBVs with clinically relevant biological and mechanical properties. Task#4 will evaluate the long-term (1 year) performance of the animal TEBV in an allogeneic setting. This study will provide: 1) in-depth understanding of the immune reactivity of this CAM, both from the innate and specific immune system. 2) long-term performance data of a woven, CAM-based, TEBV in an allogeneic setting (animal). 3) a human woven TEBV with clinically relevant mechanical properties ready for in vivo testing. This “next generation” assembly method will reduce TEBV production time/cost 3-fold and represents a more versatile, reliable and highly tunable approach. HUMAN TEXTILES will provide a COMPLETELY NEW TYPE OF SCAFFOLD for engineering a variety of organs.

Keywords: vascular graft,tissue engineering,extracellular matrix,novel biomaterial
Women’s movements and gestational surrogacy: engaging, debating and policy making (WoMoGeS)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Individual Fellowships (IF)-Global Fellowships
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Panel: Social Sciences and Humanities
Countries involved: Italy,United States
Call: Individual Fellowships (H2020-MSCA-IF-2017, 2017)
Start date: 2018-04-23
End date: 2021-04-22
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 244269.0
EU funding (EUR): 244269.0
Participants: 2
Project status: CLOSED

Gestational surrogacy (GS) is transnational practice of assisted reproduction increasingly undergone by European citizens in Member States and Third Countries. Women’s Movements (WMs), primary actors in policies on human reproduction, understand GS either as a form of commodification of women and children, or as an empowering opportunity for women in poor countries. WMs are forging alliances with other stakeholders (LGBTQI, pro-life, and private actors) to influence decision makers to abolish or to regulate GS. WoMoGeS analyzes the ‘politics of signification’ on GS of WMs in 2 developed countries, US, and Italy, and 2 developing countries, India and Mexico, to reveal variety of diagnostic, prognostic and motivational frames, their policy demands and strategic alliances across different social contexts, and the interplay between discourses and policy making at country-level and transnationally. By carrying out a comparison of 4 context-specific case-studies and engaging WMs and GS stakeholders, this project aims to hinder the risk that GS activism reproduces the same polarizing dynamics as in the debate on prostitution, and the risk that WMs’ perspectives in developing countries, main providers of surrogate mothers, are silenced by more visible WMs in developed countries. WoMoGeS aims to promote dialogue between WMs and GS stakeholders, catalyze European policy making on GS that considers diversity of thought, and to propose mature reflections on assisted reproduction based on scientific information. Training and supervision by top experts on GS at UT and on WMs at LUMSA will enable me to continue skill development started during my PhD on WMs’ contribution to gender-related discourses, strengthen my ability to work across different fields of Sociology, and acquire new competences in Bioethics and comparative social analysis, with the goal to consolidate my profile as sociologist expert in gender studies and critical analysis of social movements' discourses.

Keywords: women s movements,assisted reproduction,politics of signification,global discourses,parenthood,empowerment of women
High-level Prior Models for Computer Vision (HOMOVIS)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Computer science and informatics
Panel description: Informatics and information systems, computer science, scientific computing, intelligent systems
Countries involved: Austria
Call: ERC Starting Grant (ERC-2014-STG, 2014)
Start date: 2015-06-01
End date: 2020-12-31
Duration (months): 67.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1473525.0
EU funding (EUR): 1473525.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Since more than 50 years, computer vision has been a very active research field but it is still far away from the abilities of the human visual system. This stunning performance of the human visual system can be mainly contributed to a highly efficient three-layer architecture: A low-level layer that sparsifies the visual information by detecting important image features such as image gradients, a mid-level layer that implements disocclusion and boundary completion processes and finally a high-level layer that is concerned with the recognition of objects. Variational methods are certainly one of the most successful methods for low-level vision. However, it is very unlikely that these methods can be further improved without the integration of high-level prior models. Therefore, we propose a unified mathematical framework that allows for a natural integration of high-level priors into low-level variational models. In particular, we propose to represent images in a higher-dimensional space which is inspired by the architecture for the visual cortex. This space performs a decomposition of the image gradients into magnitude and direction and hence performs a lifting of the 2D image to a 3D space. This has several advantages: Firstly, the higher-dimensional embedding allows to implement mid-level tasks such as boundary completion and disocclusion processes in a very natural way. Secondly, the lifted space allows for an explicit access to the orientation and the magnitude of image gradients. In turn, distributions of gradient orientations – known to be highly effective for object detection – can be utilized as high-level priors. This inverts the bottom-up nature of object detectors and hence adds an efficient top-down process to low-level variational models. The developed mathematical approaches will go significantly beyond traditional variational models for computer vision and hence will define a new state-of-the-art in the field.
Gaining insights into Enzymes Transition States: Superacid as new tool to design specific CAZymes inhibitors. (GLYCOMIMIC)

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: Chemistry
Countries involved: France
Call: Individual Fellowships (H2020-MSCA-IF-2020, 2020)
Start date: 2022-09-01
End date: 2024-08-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 184707.84
EU funding (EUR): 184707.84
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Glycosciences study the structural and functional roles of carbohydrates in biology and have an increasing impact on many areas of our economy (health, food, natural resources). Carbohydrate Active enZymes (CAZymes), which catalyse the assembly (Glycosyl transferases, GTs) and breakdown (Glycosidases, GHs) of glycosidic linkage in carbohydrates, are essential to life, being involved in key cell functions. Their pharmacological modulation by means of selective CAZymes’ inhibitors can have multiple applications (e.g. antiviral TamifluTM, antidiabetic GlysetTM, molecular chaperone GalafoldTM). However, the design of inhibitors endowed of high selectivity is challenging, representing the major obstacle in discovering new potent and safe therapeutic agents targeting CAZymes. In this context, GLYCOMIMIC offers an innovative approach based on superacid chemistry to gain insights into CAZymes’ transition states (TS) and to help the design of specific inhibitors, paving the way for short-term impact on drug discovery! Superacid chemistry is only mastered by very few research groups in the world and is a European specificity of the Institute of Chemistry of Poitiers (IC2MP - UMR CNRS 7285 – France) and will be applied for the first time to glycosciences. With Univ. Barcelona (world leader in computer simulation of biological processes at atomic-electronic detail) acting as secondment, GLYCOMIMIC blends multidisciplinary states of the art research training in carbohydrate chemistry, superacids, low-temperature NMR analysis, DFT calculations, QM/MM dynamic simulation of enzymes and enzyme inhibition studies. It will provide a prolific fellow with an internationally competitive training, with the aim of advancing the career of an autonomous scientist in the EU and the next generation of multidisciplinary researchers in (bio)pharmaceutical sciences.

Keywords: superacids
School-community Partnership for Reversing Inequality and Exclusion: Transformative Practices of Segregated Schools (Inclusion4Schools)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Societal Challenges
Programme: Europe in a changing world - inclusive, innovative and reflective societies
Theme: Inclusive societies
Action type: Coordination and support actions
Countries involved: Albania,Bulgaria,Hungary,Slovakia
Call: Enhancing access and uptake of education to reverse inequalities (H2020-SC6-TRANSFORMATIONS-2020, 2020)
Start date: 2020-11-01
End date: 2024-10-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2950075.0
EU funding (EUR): 2950075.0
Participants: 6
Project status: SIGNED

The emerging European context is to a large extent characterized by widening and deepening inequalities, the crisis of democracy, and the disintegration of communities. It is especially the case in the Central-Eastern European semiperipheral, post-socialist context, where there is a growing tendency of rearticulating authoritarian, nationalist, neoconservative discourses. This „retrotopia” is conducive to the hegemonic production of an imaginary social homogeneity, which consequently stirs up reactionary xenophobia, fear, and hatred through the construction of external intruders (e.g. the migrant) and enemies within (e.g. the Roma). Since the leitmotif of this programme is primarily educational, the proposed action targets such (imaginary, symbolic, and real) walls of exclusion which are intended to segregate children (based on class, ethnicity, gender, etc.), which are meant to divide and alienate the local communities to which those children nonetheless belong, thus actively (re)producing inequalities. In contrast to the power-relations of exclusion, the culture of silence, and the reproduction of unjust structures, the project aims to foster and promote pedagogical relations of inclusion, a culture of dialogue, and the transformation of unjust structures through education. Running in parallel to the research and innovation actions the central objectives of the proposed action are (1) to support and coordinate community schools (as being central to the constitution and maintenance of cohesive local communities) and their respective communities of practice, and (2) to create a place and culture of sharing (knowledge, praxis, solidarity) between such communities by initiating and coordinating the convergence and synergies of local, regional and transnational communities. The expected impact of the proposed project is to contribute to the European initiatives and interventions that aim at reversing inequalities.

Keywords: community schools,transformative practices,school university partnership
Multi-driver climate change effects on SEAgrass METabolism: ecosystem implications (SEAMET)

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: Environment and Geosciences
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call: Individual Fellowships (H2020-MSCA-IF-2016, 2016)
Start date: 2018-01-08
End date: 2020-01-07
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 183454.8
EU funding (EUR): 183454.8
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Pressures linked to global climate change (GCC) (i.e. ocean acidification (OA), warming and hypoxia) represent a major threat for marine ecosystems. The single and combined effects of GCC drivers is expected to alter the energetic costs of main metabolic routes, forcing trade-offs in organismal metabolism, with further impacts in the functioning of the whole ecosystem to which they belong. While we have an improving understanding of the impacts of single and paired stressors on individual organisms in the laboratory, to determine real-world impacts of GCC we need to comprehend the impacts of multiple stressors on individuals, understand the acclimation and adaptation processes and assess the repercussion on the ecosystems functioning. SEAMET addresses this major challenge in marine science by assessing if marine communities can survive under the multiple stressor future driven by GCC. SEAMET will use a key benthic habitat-forming species (seagrasses) as model system employing net metabolic balance (NMB) as a functional trait to scale up implications of individual readjustments to GCC on the functioning of the whole ecosystem. It will determine i) the mechanistic basis that regulates C incorporation and photosynthetic physiology, ii) the physiological plasticity and tolerance thresholds of organisms to different combinations of GCC drivers (OA, temperature (T) and hypoxia), and iii) the in situ acclimation and adaptation potential of organisms and associated communities to GCC. SEAMET uses a novel multidisciplinary approach to ensure candidate training and the transfer of knowledge to the host institution. Internationally competitive outputs will be a direct contribution to European MSFD2008/56/EC directive and Horizon2020 strategy for climate action providing novel insights into the effects of climate change on marine ecosystems and their functioning.

Keywords: acclimation and adaptation potential,climate change drivers,metabolic balance,physiological plasticity,tolerance thresholds,marine photoautotrophs,seagrasses
Excelling LABUST in marine robotics (EXCELLABUST)

Framework: Horizon 2020 — Spreading excellence and widening participation
Programme: Widening participation and spreading excellence
Theme: Improved access to Excellence
Action type: Coordination and support actions
Countries involved: Spain,Ireland,Italy,Croatia
Call: Twinning (H2020-TWINN-2015, 2015)
Start date: 2016-01-01
End date: 2018-12-31
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1014551.0
EU funding (EUR): 1014551.0
Participants: 4
Project status: CLOSED

Laboratory for Underwater Systems and Technologies (LABUST) at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical and Engineering (UNIZG-FER) in Croatia positioned itself in the last years as the regional leader in marine robotics: LABUST has the required technologies, people, infrastructure, and experience in field experiments. What LABUST is missing is research excellence that will allow it to fully exploit and bring available resources to a level compatible with internationally leading institutions in the area of marine robotics. The main goal of EXCELLABUST project is to address networking gaps and deficiencies between UNIZG-FER and internationally leading counterparts at EU level, by significantly strengthening marine robotics research within LABUST through twinning with expert partners. The first objective is to increase UNIZG-FER marine robotics scientific excellence and innovation capacity, and raise staff's research profile within three strategic research domains (SRDs) that are aligned with the Strategic Research Agenda for Robotics in Europe 2014 - 2020: 1) mapping and perception, 2) advanced navigation, guidance, and control, and 3) autonomy and cognition. The second objective is to increase UNIZG-FER scientific involvement and visibility. These objectives will be reached through a set of strategic measures: staff exchanges and expert visits for providing S&T knowledge transfer; on-site trainings for providing hands-on S&T experience; innovation management trainings; organization of research-industry workshops for strengthening links to marine robotics industry; and joint organization of summer schools with strong emphasis on application of marine robotics for strengthening links to marine robotics end-users from marine biology, marine archaeology, oceanography, marine security, etc. In order to measure the quality of the twinning action, key impact indicators are defined and they will be monitored during and after the EXCELLABUST project lifetime.

Keywords: marine robotics,underwater robots,autonomous marine vehicles,underwater mapping,navigation,guidance and control,autonomy,cognition