ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

This project develops and tests two related innovations – an interactive online exhibition and an arts consultancy service – as complementary parts of a package of cultural resources. The package is designed to make the research produced by the Indigeneity in the Contemporary World (ICW) project team accessible to the public, and, also, to stimulate new creative and educational uses of the project’s findings, in collaboration with indigenous artists, intellectuals and communities. The proposed innovations will maximize the reach and social impact of the ICW project by tapping its vast audiovisual records and international networks to foster creative dialogues among indigenous performance makers and cultural-sector workers and audiences, in Europe and beyond. The ICW team possesses a wealth of specialist knowledge about ways in which indigenous performance illuminates social and political debates on a transnational scale. Using this knowledge, the team hopes to build bridges between cultures and art forms. At a broader level, the online exhibition and consultancy service are conceived as building blocks for a new, flexible, open-access archive of interlinked multi-modal resources that will encourage users to engage with contemporary indigenous performance in dynamic ways. Performances are live and embodied, while records of cultural events exist in objects and recordings that can seem staid and unapproachable. The aim of this project is to model a unique, accessible and ethical resource platform that brings the intangible processes of performance making into dialogue with tangible records of specific events. Our objective is to change the ways in which Europe conceives of its colonial pasts and its multicultural futures.

149 934 €

Start date: 2013-07-01, End date: 2014-06-30

Colour vision deficiency (CVD) is a genetic disorder of colour vision that affects 7.4% of European males and 0.4% of European females. Although there are reliable tests for diagnosing CVD in adults and older children, there are only a few tests for young children, and fundamental issues with these tests render them unreliable. For example, colours used in the tests are too similar for young children to discriminate given their immature colour vision, tasks are too difficult for them to complete, tests either over- or under-diagnose CVD, or are not widely accessible. Therefore, the current situation is that CVD can be reliably diagnosed only from about 5 years onwards. Earlier diagnosis would enable steps to be taken to ensure CVD children are not disadvantaged in early years education that relies on colour coded schemes and materials. Our goal is to develop, evaluate and bring to market an age-appropriate early years test for CVD. Our research on the ERC funded ‘CATEGORIES’ project is investigating the development of colour perception in over 1400 infants and toddlers. This extensive testing has given us specialist insight into the exact colours that are appropriate for an early years test for CVD. We have also developed age-appropriate tasks that measure young children’s responses to colour in a reliable and efficient manner. In the current project we propose to develop an early years CVD test in the form of an app. The test will use the colours that we have defined and the tasks that we have developed, and we aim for it to provide an accurate CVD diagnosis. The project will take the test to proof of concept and will establish the scientific validity, technical feasibility and commercialisation process. We aim that the test will be the ‘gold standard’ for educators, clinicians, scientists and parents. This will ensure that CVD can be detected earlier than is currently the case, bringing important and tangible benefits for education, clinical practice and research.

149 645 €

Start date: 2016-12-01, End date: 2018-05-31

All pharmaceutical, chemical and cosmetic products have to undergo rigorous toxicity testing before going to market. In the past, this was often done through testing with animals, but this approach has been in rapid decline. The alternative is testing of products for toxicity against mammalian cells in multi-well plates. This technique is very important in the pharmaceutical industry where early detection of drug toxicity can reduce the cost of bringing drugs to market. Testing against hepatocytes (liver cells) is critically important, but these cells are difficult to cryopreserve in multi-well plates. At present they have to be shipped globally in a fresh format, presenting major logistical challenges, and then used within days, often with less than ideal results in terms of cell uniformity and test reproducibility. In CryoProtect, I will develop a means of cryopreserving cells within multi-well plates allowing them be shipped to laboratories around the world and thawed only when they are needed. In the absence of ice nucleants, aqueous cell suspensions can supercool well below the ice melting point which often results in cell death. I have already pioneered the use of feldspar as an ice nucleant in cryopreservation. However, feldspar alone is not enough to cryopreserve cells in multi-well plates. In this PoC application I propose to build on a discovery related to our work on ice nucleation by sea spray aerosol, published in Nature. We can substantially improve the ice nucleating ability of feldspar by adding ammonium ions to the solution in which cells are suspended prior to freezing (this solution is called the cryoprotectant solution) leading to enhanced survival rates of hepatocytes. This PoC grant is needed in order to optimise the composition of the new cryoprotectant formulation for specific applications, trials and testing, producing technical marketing materials, assessment of significant markets and the development of an evidence based business plan.

149 926 €

Start date: 2016-06-01, End date: 2017-11-30

The idea to be taken to proof of concept is to develop and test an innovative EU Case Law Corpus (EUCLCORP). EUCLCORP will be a standardised, multidimensional and multilingual corpus of the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and of the constitutional/supreme courts of EU member states. Unlike databases, in which users can carry out only relatively straightforward searches, for the occurrence of specific terms or keywords, corpora allow users to search and track how particular linguistic expressions and features are used in context. The corpus will be coded linguistically and with metadata to enable stakeholders such as lawyers, legal translators, lexicographers and linguists, as well as academics to compare meanings of terms across languages and legal systems, to compare translation options and monitor the consistency of translation in EU case law. Furthermore, EUCLCORP will allow users to track the migration of terms between legal systems and to create data-driven legal dictionaries and terminological databases. No such corpus currently exists. By adding to the big data currently available in legal databases, EUCLCORP will contribute to a better understanding of EU law and of the Europeanisation of law as well as improved administration of justice.

150 000 €

Start date: 2016-07-01, End date: 2017-12-31

"FIRSTTIME is dedicated to generating new unique instruments that Election Management Bodies (EMB) worldwide can use to organise a bespoke electoral experience for first time voters and increase their satisfaction and turnout. We will partner with EMBs to test them in real elections. FIRSTTIME follows on from the INMIVO grant which won accolades such as Best International Research Award from the Market Research Society, led to multiple books, articles in leading journals, and major policy impact as we advised IGOs and 4 different EMBs on electoral system reform, improving disabled & illiterate citizens' vote and civic education. Young people are largely disillusioned with politics and abstention often tempts them. Yet, INMIVO showed that participation in one of our first two elections determines turnout for our entire life. We found that young people are very excited at the idea of participating in their electoral 'first time'. We also demonstrated that the organisation of one's first election affects trust in democracy, perceived representation, and future turnout. However, our comprehensive preliminary study shows that major democracies do not specifically tailor the electoral experience of first time voters, relying instead on ineffective information campaigns. FIRSTTIME will test 6 protocols to optimise first time voters' experience before (election packs, mentoring system, etc), during (dedicated help at polling stations, etc) and after (certificate, celebration, etc) the vote, with an aim to maximise their satisfaction and turnout. We have already secured collaboration intention from EMBs so as to experiment these instruments in real elections in 4 democracies (2 new &2 established) . The results will be used to produce ""first time voter"" instrument guidelines disseminated to end-users, presented in conferences and major events (UN, European Parliament) and made available to EMBs to re-attract young voters to the polling booth when it matters most. "

150 000 €

Start date: 2016-01-01, End date: 2017-06-30

"While language is a natural way to interact with artificial characters or agents in video games, communication with agents currently tends to be limited to menu systems. To achieve smooth linguistic communication, utterances need to be grounded in the situation in which they occur. That is, the meanings of utterances must be learned from observing their use in some naturally occurring perceptual context. Recent years have seen much progress in the development of visually- or auditorily-grounded language understanding using novel machine learning techniques such as deep learning. At the same time, companies like Google DeepMind have introduced deep learning models that can learn to play games at super-human levels. We propose to take this research to the next step, by grounding natural language in video games. Grounding natural language in video games yields two main benefits. The first benefit is commercial in nature: with the global market for video games expected to reach $100 billion by 2017, there is clearly a large demand for more sophisticated interaction with in-game agents. Secondly, video games are a natural way to explore artificial intelligence techniques in a ""simulated"" world that is easier to understand computationally than the extremely complicated ""real"" world. The current project will explore natural language grounding in a small number of appropriate games. Once we are capable of grounding natural language in these games, we can translate utterances into straightforward actions for artificial agents. An example might be telling your team members to follow you, to take the left flank, or to duck when they are being shot at. Given the recent developments in machine learning and grounded language understanding, we believe that now is the perfect moment to explore these possibilities further. "

149 867 €

Start date: 2016-10-01, End date: 2018-03-31

"The discovery of the catalytic properties of gold has advanced understanding of the fundamental properties of catalyst materials and has opened new avenues for catalyst design and reaction control. However, the price of gold is a significant barrier to commercial uptake and implementation. A discovery arising from the ERC Advanced grant ‘After the Goldrush’ (ERC-2011-AdG-291319) offers the prospect of a new generation of catalyst materials that have all the beneficial features of gold-based catalysts, but utilising much cheaper metals. The proposed programme (LOWCOSTPEROXIDE) will bring to pre-commercial stage a selective, efficient and cost-effective catalyst system for the direct synthesis of the valuable commodity chemical, hydrogen peroxide, from hydrogen and oxygen."

149 507 €

Start date: 2013-04-01, End date: 2014-03-31

Small scale continuous synthesis in catalytic flow reactors is recognized as one of the major technologies that would enable and even boost process intensification and it would allow to develop substantially cleaner, safer and more energy efficient chemical processes. The leading fine chemicals companies are already implementing restructuring programs targeted at the reduction of large scale chemical manufacturing and eliminations of large chemical plants. The scalability of the catalytic flow reactors remains a challenge due to (i) technical difficulties to coat a large number of parallel channels with a catalytic coating in a reproducible way and (ii) to equally distribute multiphase flow over a large number of channels. These problems have been addressed and solved in the related ERC project. In this PoC project, I will combine these two concepts to develop a multichannel capillary catalytic reactor which would be able to increase production rate up to a kg/day scale. A “plug-and-play” platform for small-scale distributed synthesis of fine chemicals will be constructed and the commercial potential of the new reactor concept will be explored. The market analysis will examine the market drivers, market gaps, market share between different market segments across the world. Potential industrial partners will be selected such as contract research manufacturing, licensees and potential customers. The outcome of this PoC project will be an exclusive licence of the patent application to a contract research manufacturing company that has the expertise and resources to further develop and commercialise the reactor prototype towards a fully-licensed industrial apparatus. The performance of the apparatus will be evaluated by an end user company. By commercialising the device, this project will facilitate small-scale production of fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals via environmentally benign catalytic routes.

149 930 €

Start date: 2016-02-01, End date: 2017-07-31

In this application a platform is proposed that builds on preliminary work from ERC starting grant NanoP in order to develop a technology for high throughput electronic recognition of a large library of proteins using nanometer sized channels. These channel (or nanopore) dimensions are on the same order of magnitude as the proteins that we are using, making a natural confinement mechanism. Importantly, this allows for the efficient detection and screening of individual protein molecules and as will be shown in a high throughput manner. Here we propose to couple protein recognition to an electrical readout via a nanopore, that will result in improved prospects in efficiency, scalability, and sensitivity. Furthermore, this grant will allow for appropriate market research and IP landscaping to be performed in order to ensure the preferred option of setting up a spin-out company will be positioned correctly to ensure success.

149 990 €

Start date: 2016-01-01, End date: 2017-06-30

There are a range of emerging solar technologies which are pushing to achieve power conversion efficiencies of similar values to thin film solar cells, but with a materials base and manufacturability of a much lower cost. Within the ERC starting grant HYPER, we have developed a new solid-state absorber material and device structure, which represents a distinctly new emerging solar technology based on solution processed inorganic and organic semiconductors. This new material system has delivered power conversion efficiencies, as measured under simulated AM1.5 sun light at 100 mWcm2 irradiance, of over 10% which puts it at the very top of the emerging PV technologies. Beyond performance however, in order to “prove” commercial viability, long term stability needs to be demonstrated. Within this proof of concept project, long term stability will be externally verified, and a strong IP position and strategy will be developed through professional IP strategists.

150 000 €

Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2014-06-30

Currently the most widely used drugs for the treatment of cancer are platinum compounds, used in nearly 50% of all chemotherapeutic regimens. However the platinums can suffer from problems of resistance, a limited spectrum of activity, and side-effects. Hence new agents with new mechanisms of action are urgently needed. We have discovered novel organometallic osmium and iridium compounds with more potent anticancer activity and unique mechanisms of action. Initial work on an osmium compound has demonstrated promising activity against colorectal cancer without toxic side-effects, providing an opportunity to satisfy unmet clinical needs. The ERC PoC funding will allow the discovery phase to be advanced, to turn hits into leads by establishing and validating target sites, and elucidating mechanisms of action. The techniques employed to achieve this PoC will combine high throughput proteomcs/genomics approaches with image analysis of cancer cell morphology in a mathematical analysis to determine the mechanism of action. Data from cancer models will validate the efficacy of the most active compounds. This portfolio of data, together with desk research on potential patient populations, will provide a strong basis for attracting a partner in the next stage of preclinical development.

149 559 €

Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2014-04-30

Metal halide perovskites have recently astonished the research community and garnered a mass following to realize extremely high efficiency low cost photovoltaics. This work was largely catalyzed by outputs from the ERC-Stg HYPER, but in addition to solar cell applications, these materials could also be near perfect light emission materials for displays and lighting. This POC grant will formulate a strategy to move the perovskite materials and device research towards commercial exploitation as light sources. Within the project an assessment of the impact perovskite nanocrystals could have in the current lighting market will be undertaken, and a strategy to capitalise upon exiting Oxford IP and how best to develop foreground IP will be formulated. To complement these activities, a demonstrator perovskite light source will be created. From the derived information on IP and business development, a business plan will be delivered which will be taken to the investor community following successful completion of the POC project. This project will therefore enable the transition for perovskite light emitting nanocrystals from University research to a commercial venture.

149 983 €

Start date: 2016-01-01, End date: 2017-06-30

Intra- hepatic Cholangiocytes represent one of the main cell type of the liver with hepatocytes. They line the biliary tract and fulfill essential functions such as bile modification and transport. Cholangiocytes are targeted by a diversity of diseases including genetic disorders such as Cystic Fibrosis. There is currently no cure for disorders affecting cholangiocytes and end stage disease require liver transplantation. Importantly, primary cholangiocytes obtained from biopsy can not be grown in vitro without loosing their functional characteristics while transformed cells and animal models rarely recapitulate the entire pathophysiology of human diseases. Consequently, the development of novel drug and therapies remains problematic despite an urgent clinical need. Human induced pluripotent stem cells could provide an advantageous solution to bypass this major challenge. Indeed, these pluripotent stem cells are generated by direct reprograming of somatic cells and they can proliferate almost indefinitely in vitro while maintaining their capacity to differentiate into almost any cell types. Interestingly, hIPSC can be derived from patients with genetic disorders and then differentiated into the relevant cell types for disease modeling purposes. Of direct interest, we recently developed a protocol to generate cholangiocytes from hIPSCs using chemically define conditions. The resulting cells display functional characteristics of their in vivo counterpart including the capacity to transport bile acid. Here, we propose to enable our culture system for the production of large quantity of hIPSCs derived cholangiocytes in conditions compatible with the pharmaceutical industry requirements. The resulting cells will be then fully characterized to validate their relevance for modeling Cystic fibrosis and for testing small molecules. Thus, the overall objective of this project is to create a novel drug screening platform for the discovery of therapeutics targeting genetic form of cholangiopathies.

149 907 €

Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2018-02-28

Silks are fully sustainable, non-perishable and climate-smart agricultural products. They are uniquely suited for areas of low-wage/high-unemployment and fragile ecosystems sensitive about water and soil. At the same time, silks and silk-derived materials are used for simple as well as highly sophisticated applications and products with low to high potential for adding value with rather moderate investment. The Oxford Silk Group’s research on the ERC funded “Silk as Biomimetic Ideals for Polymers” led to a number of novel and important insights that combine proprietary know-how with patented concepts. A key invention allows a wide range of novel silks to be accessed - thus freeing the global industry from the heavy reliance on mulberry silks and adding novel wild silks to the market. This, together with other original insights and innovations, and combined with Silk ‘Life Cycle Analysis’ allows now the planning and execution of novel silk projects in an economically robust as well as environmentally sustainable way. Our unique selling points are: (1) our Oxford research group is one of very few market leaders globally in the field of R&D on silks and has (2) unique insights in wild silk IP, in addition to (3) a pipeline of novel, sustainable silk products combined with (4) proprietary LCA models developed from silk farms around the world and derived from a rapidly developing and extensive network of collaborators.

113 034 €

Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2013-12-31

On today’s mobile devices, location plays a pivotal role, enabling a raft of current applications such as navi- gation, location-based neighbourhood discovery, “check-in” style applications and targeted advertising. How- ever, the location stack on smartphones today largely relies on GPS, which does not work indoors. Today, phones scan for nearby WiFi access points (APs) and use the measured received signal strengths (RSS) to derive coarse indoor location. Owing to random fluctuations in received signal strength, this approach has an inherently-limited accuracy (5–10 metres) and can sometimes result in gross errors of up to 20 metres, resulting in a poor and unpredictable user experience. From conversations with potential users including museums, convention centres, and retailers, we have learned that a 5–10 metre accuracy does not suffice for the applications people want. For example, museums want to provide visitors with a mobile application that can show content specific to the current room, and nearest exhibit. Major retailers and brands are interested in providing location-based content and targeted offers to users shopping in stores, with a reliable location fix at the aisle level or better. The ability to provide a location fix with less than a metre accuracy will enable these applications, and also open up potentially exciting new applications such as augmented reality. There exist approaches that use ultrasound, RF, or Bluetooth hardware to localise to within less than a metre. However these typically do not work across smartphone platforms, and require the widespread deployment of specialised infrastructure that must be powered and networked to a backhaul. This creates a huge barrier to commercial success because it increases acquisition cost. Additionally, each sale requires going through a lengthy process of clearance from IT and facilities departments in the organisation buying the solution. We note an exciting opportunity to take the following fresh approach to indoor location that provides high accuracy and can work with the existing wireless AP infrastructure in the building. Most indoor spaces today already have such infrastructure, or plan to deploy it to provide visitor Internet access, and WiFi is available across smartphone platforms without exception. We also note the increasing prevalence of multi-antenna APs, mainly to bolster capacity and coverage with multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) techniques. We propose SmartTap, an indoor location system that uses MIMO-based angle-of-arrival (AoA) techniques at the AP to track wireless clients in real time as they roam about a building. When a client transmits a single frame over the air, each SmartTap AP receives the packet and performs an AoA analysis on the incoming signal. A backend server then fuses the AoA information from each AP together in order to get a physical location fix on the client. As clients roam around the building, the backend server updates the location of each. AoA is superior to the RSS based methods in use today because it is more accurate, more responsive, and requires fewer APs, making it more robust in buildings with sparse WiFi coverage such as retail stores. The expected outcome of the SmartTap project is a demonstration of the system localising clients in real time that can be shown to potential customers. We will develop a hardware module (the SmartTap) using off- the shelf components to tap into the baseband processor of already-deployed APs, with the goal of one-metre indoor localisation accuracy. We are confident that the cost savings, leveraging of existing infrastructure, and lack of need for extensive internal clearance processes will make SmartTap more attractive to potential customers than the status quo.

149 238 €

Start date: 2013-04-01, End date: 2014-09-30

We propose a robust polymer-based system that allows a safer delivery of recombinant human bone morphogenetic protein-2 (rhBMP2) for bone tissue engineering. We have teamed up with a surgeon (Dr. Meek) and an SME (Taragenyx Ltd.) in the planning stages, for the appraisal of the proposal from a translational standpoint. Later, Taragenyx will also be involved with scaling-up and commercialisation. We filed a patent covering the technology, and licensed Taragenyx its exploitation. rhBMP2 is a powerful human growth factor (GF) essential in tissue morphogenesis and used to promote bone growth in clinical applications. Current clinical delivery has encountered serious complications associated with the high doses used. We have developed a system that allows the effective presentation of GFs in combination with the integrin binding domain of fibronectin (FN), promoting simultaneous and co-localised signalling between GF receptors and integrins. We have shown the ability of Poly(ethyl acrylate) PEA to organise FN and sequester rhBMP2 in synergy with the integrin binding region to direct stem cell differentiation. This technology enhances bone regeneration and vascularisation with lower rhBMP-2 doses. With this understanding we have engineered a system to regenerate a bone critical size defect in a murine model. Results were comparable to the higher doses used in the clinic, which makes the system safe, effective and more competitive than current commercial products. PEA is however a non-degradable material, a major hurdle to be overcome for many potential applications. We will fabricate a degradable construct spray-coated with a nanometric layer of this functional material to induce and direct bone growth – as already shown for the bulk polymer in our ERC Grant, and investigate in vivo the engineered systems. Overall, we will develop a safe and versatile bone system for clinical use in patients with non-union bone defects, and set a route towards commercialisation.

148 783 €

Start date: 2016-06-01, End date: 2017-11-30

"Research undertaken on ERC Advanced Grant 226593 (COORDSPACE) has delivered a new exciting range of the multi-functional materials known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). These substances have ultra-high porosity and this makes them ideal for many high value applications including gas storage, carbon capture, gas and substrate separation, sensing, drug delivery, photo-optics, magnetic devices and catalysis. However, the major barrier to their commercialisation is their lack of availability in high scale via economically and environmentally viable production routes. Our research has established for the first time (patent application in progress) the use of high temperature water using flow technologies for the sustainable synthesis of porous MOF materials. This represents an important advance in the preparation of MOFs by removing the need for toxic and expensive organic solvents, and removing the need for purification and removal of organic solvents from the prepared materials. Furthermore, flow technologies offer exciting and potentially economic routes to scale-up of these materials for potential commercialisation and we estimate our process reduces the cost of MOF manufacture by at least a factor of five. We believe that our process has great commercial potential and significance, and we now need to optimise routes against the many different market potentials. The commercialisation of this research was not part of the original grant proposal and, therefore, we seek Proof of Concept funding to prepare a market ready package of information to be presented to venture capitalists or companies that might invest in this technology and take it through the early commercialisation phase."

142 559 €

Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2013-12-31

"MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a novel class of human disease genes that are key to a number of therapeutic areas in particular cancer, and also heart disease, infectious disease and ageing. Specifically, some miRNAs are known to regulate cancer therapeutic targets acting as tumour suppressors and some are prognostic and diagnostic markers of human disease. The requirement for targeted anti-cancer therapies to effect specific disease treatment is well established and considered a primary goal for moving cancer towards a treatable, controllable chronic condition. miRNA-based therapeutics is a well-occupied space. However, existing commercial efforts and IP is focused on the use of oligonucleotides and oligonucleotide derivatives to inhibit or modulate the expression of miRNAs. Such efforts have been largely limited by the challenges associated with poor delivery. Instead we have identified novel opportunities to target miRNA pathways using small molecules. Specifically, we discovered a novel class of enzymes (TUTases) that regulate miRNAs by terminal polyuridylation. We found that a specific member of this family (Tut4) acts to inhibit the tumour suppressor miRNA let-7 in a model organism and human cancer cells. TUTases likely provide multiple novel anti-cancer targets. For example, the Tutase Gld2 was recently shown to regulate the p53 tumour suppressor pathway by modifying the miR-122 miRNA. We have developed an efficient in vitro assay of Tut4 activity. Here, we want to develop this assay into a high-throughput screening platform to identify small molecule inhibitors of Tutases. Such small molecules are proof-of-concept molecules for a novel anti-cancer strategy."

98 927 €

Start date: 2012-11-01, End date: 2013-10-31