Upcoming and open funding calls

Calls for Funding
The full text for Innovative Health Initiative call 6 may be found here. EU4Health calls may be found in full here.

• EIC Pathfinder: For projects in any field of science, technology or application without predefined thematic priorities
• EIC Challenge 2: Generative-AI based Agents to Revolutionize Medical Diagnosis and Treatment of Cancer
• EIC Accelerator 3: GenAI4EU: Creating European Champions in Generative AI
• IHI Call 9: A single-stage, applicant driven call
• IHI Call 10: A two-stage call with topics on PFAS, the EHDS, and digital labelling
• CR-p-24-38: Development of European guidelines and quality assurance scheme for gastric cancer prevention and care and preparing the third report on the status of implementation of the Council Recommendations on cancer screening

EIC Pathfinder – For projects in any field of science, technology or application without predefined thematic priorities

The EIC Pathfinder is a funding programme under Horizon Europe that offers support to research teams by:

• Funding research to develop the scientific basis to underpin breakthrough technologies
• Supporting the earliest stages of scientific, technological or deep-tech R&D
• Aiming to build on new, cutting-edge directions in science and technology to disrupt a field and a market or create new opportunities
• Realising innovative technological solutions to identify, develop and scale up breakthrough technologies and disruptive innovations in Europe

You must submit your proposal via the Funding and Tender Opportunities Portal before the given deadline. Which instrument is right for you?

• ‘EIC Pathfinder Open’, open to support projects in any field of science, technology or application without predefined thematic priorities.
• ‘EIC Pathfinder Challenges’ to support coherent portfolios of projects within predefined thematic areas with the aim to achieve specific objectives for each Challenge.

Deadline for submitting your proposal:

• EIC Pathfinder Open: 21 May 2025 – Indicative budget: grants of up to EUR 3 million or more if duly justified
• EIC Pathfinder Challenges: 29 October 2025 – Indicative budget: grants of up to EUR 4 million or more if duly justified

Before applying for the EIC Pathfinder Open, you should review the EIC Pathfinder Challenges and check if your project matches any of the predefined topics. The EIC Pathfinder Open and the EIC Pathfinder Challengers are described extensively in the EIC Work Programme. In particular, challenge 2 (p. 37) and accelerator 3 (p. 86) relate strongly to imaging and are described below.

EIC Challenge 2

Generative-AI based Agents to Revolutionize Medical Diagnosis and
Treatment of Cancer

Indicative budget: € 4 million
Opening: 28 July 2025
Deadline(s): 29 October 2025

Keywords: artificial intelligence, European AI Strategy, Cancer Plan for Europe, Cancer Mission, autonomous agents, personalised treatment

Expected Outcome

In support of the European AI Strategy and the Cancer Plan for Europe and the Cancer Mission this Challenge looks to support the the development of the next generation models for cancer diagnosis and treatment, with Generative AI.

This Challenge aims to create a collaborative environment where diverse expertise — including for example data science, informatics, oncology, radiology, pathology, medical physics, bioinformatics, geneticists, healthcare administrators, and patient advocacy groups — converges to address the complexities of developing autonomous agents for holistic patient care, through enhanced diagnosis and personalized treatment.

The Challenge aspires to significantly improve patient care and reduce pressure on the healthcare system by leveraging advanced interactive autonomous agents for diagnosis and personalized treatment. By alleviating the burdens on clinicians and ensuring compliance with the EU concept for Trustworthy AI, the initiative will enhance the quality and reliability of medical services. Economically, it promises substantial cost reductions and cost avoidance, leading to long-term improvements in healthcare efficiency and sustainability. Ultimately, this challenge will foster innovation and establish Europe as a leader in the field, delivering profound benefits to patients, healthcare providers, and society at large.

The portfolio of selected projects will be designed to deliver a set of agents/models for improved diagnosis and personalized treatment of the above-mentioned cancers.

Specifically, the projects will collaborate to:

• Create a shared database of synthetically generated images to be used across all projects for the development of their algorithms;
• Compare the use of a combination of the agents in the case of multiple cancers;
• Benchmark agents for enhanced diagnosis and personalized treatment selection;
• Define innovative clinical pathways in oncology;
• Externally validate the developed agents within a project at clinical premises of another project in the portfolio;
• Develop standardized methods and frameworks for evaluating AI- Act and Medical Device Regulation (MDR)-compliant generative AI models.

The portfolio of projects to be funded under this Challenge will be composed in such a way that they address ideally all cancers mentioned in this call, apply different technologies, and provide access to relevant clinical facilities and research infrastructures. The following categories will be used for the composition:

• Category 1 – type of cancer
• Category 2 – type of technology
• Category 3 – access to appropriate infrastructure data and ecosystem integration.

Scope

Imaging is a crucial component of cancer clinical protocols, providing detailed morphological, structural, metabolic, and functional information. However, harnessing the full potential of the data generated through medical imaging in clinical settings remains challenging. Clinicians often struggle to combine diverse and large-scale data into a comprehensive view of patient care, disease progression, and treatment efficacy. The inability to seamlessly integrate and interpret diverse data sources result in suboptimal patient outcomes and inefficiencies in the delivery of healthcare.

The integration of traditional Artificial Intelligence (AI) with medical imaging can transform healthcare, but most existing applications are still in their infancy and must overcome a number of challenges to accelerate adoption. These include AI applications being confined to single data modalities, which restricts their overall effectiveness (Monomodal Application); inadequate and insufficient data training, leading to data scarcity and a lack of generalizability, making them less reliable across diverse patient populations, including with regard to gender-sensitivity; and the lack of AI model interpretability, as many AI systems function as “black boxes,” providing little insight
into their decision-making processes. This lack of transparency limits trust in the systems and their usability in clinical settings.

The goal of this Pathfinder Challenge is to create interactive GenAI autonomous agents and/or a combination of them (super-agent) that provide clinicians with a holistic end to end perspective of patient care, throughout the entire clinical pathway. These agents aim to enhance pattern identification, reduce inconsistencies and errors in diagnoses as well as improve cancer treatment. While the focus is on GenAI, we also encourage the integration of other advanced AI technologies, such as topological and geometric deep learning, neural fields, graph neural networks, etc., which can complement and enhance the robustness and effectiveness of GenAI-based solutions in addressing the challenges of cancer diagnosis and therapy.

The Challenge will support early-stage groundbreaking research projects that will develop and validate novel approaches and concepts for integrating and interpreting multimodal medical imaging and health data. Additionally, it will involve generating reliable synthetic medical data, which will also be pooled to form a common database and used for the development of advanced algorithms.

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EIC Accelerator 3

GenAI4EU: Creating European Champions in Generative AI

Indicative budget: € 50 million
Opening: 20 February 2025
Deadline(s): 21 May 2025

Keywords: artificial intelligence, startups and SMEs, modelling, Trustworthy AI, Gen AI

Expected Outcome

This Challenge will support the further development and validation of Gen AI models and/or downstream applications, which are “European-Value driven” and contributes to the ambitions of the AI Act and the European approach to Artificial Intelligence. The AI models developed under this Challenge are expected to comply with the EU concept for Trustworthy AI and the relevant ethical principles with due attention paid to data quality, transparency & accountability, privacy, and security.

In the medium to longer term, it is expected to reduce dependencies and support companies in leveraging the advances in generative AI, enhance their products and develop new ones that:

• Optimise existing workflows: utilising Generative AI technologies to streamline and improve operational processes across various industries;
• Enhance human capabilities: Applying advanced AI models to enhance decision making, creativity, and productivity;
• Are validated for application: Ensuring that the AI models are both advanced and thoroughly validated for practical applicability and scalability in real-world scenarios.

The selected beneficiaries will receive favourable access to European supercomputing resources for the training of their large foundation models, in the context of the AI Factories in line with the EuroHPC regulation. In addition, they may benefit from additional actions aimed at creating strategic partnerships with major industries or attracting further capital. Where relevant, opportunities may be explored to provide the selected beneficiaries with access to scientific datasets through the European Open Science Cloud or to provide users of the European Open Science Cloud with access to the tools developed by the beneficiaries.

Scope

While Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are already delivering significant improvements in healthcare, aiding climate change mitigation and adaptation, enhancing production systems through predictive maintenance, and increasing the security of European citizens and business, generative AI (GenAI) is expected to revolutionize these fields further. GenAI promises a transformative impact on our daily lives by significantly advancing capabilities across various domains.

GenAI however still faces notable challenges, such as unexplained inaccuracies (i.e., hallucinations) and a lack of transparency and accountability in decision-making, which undermines trust and poses questions regarding the safety and reliability of the systems. These are even more critical in the case of more advanced applications, needing greater scale and integration within user workflows, particularly in sensitive or safety-critical settings like clinical workflows or the management of critical infrastructures.

In line with the AI innovation package supporting Artificial Intelligence startups and SMEs, and with the EU AI Act, targeted at the development, deployment and takeup of trustworthy AI in the EU, this Challenge contributes to fostering a European, human-centric approach to AI, that embodies EU values and works towards guaranteeing Europe’s tech sovereignty in a critical technology area identified under the Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP).

The aim of this Challenge is to support start-ups and SMEs committed to bringing transformative AI-driven solutions to market. The proposed solutions should safeguard human autonomy and enhance human expertise thus providing significant added value to decision-making processes, services or industrial workflows. Novel solutions with broad future applicability are particularly encouraged.

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IHI call 9 – a single-stage, applicant driven call

Opening: 16 January 2025
Deadline: 29 April 2025

As already announced, IHI call 9 will be a single-stage, applicant driven call in early 2025 with five topics aligned with the five specific objectives set out in the IHI Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA). For this call, we want applicants to explore the SRIA and identify untapped opportunities that could be transformed into public-private projects through IHI.

• Topic 1: Boosting innovation for a better understanding of the determinants of health
• Topic 2: Boosting innovation through better integration of fragmented health R&I efforts
• Topic 3: Boosting innovation for peopled centred integrated healthcare solutions
• Topic 4: Boosting innovation through exploitation of digitalisation and data exchange in healthcare
• Topic 5: Boosting innovation for better assessment of the added value of innovative integrated healthcare solutions

View the final call 9 text

People who have an idea for a project are encouraged to share it through the IHI online brokerage platform.

For more information on the call, what makes a good idea for an IHI project proposal, and how to share a proposal for a project, catch up on the recent IHI info session. Online info sessions from January 7-16 will address all call topics plus the rules, procedures and financial aspects of single-stage calls. For contributing partners, a special info session on January 30 will provide an in-depth exploration of the key aspects of becoming an IHI contributing partner.

IHI call 10 – a two-stage call with topics on PFAS, the EHDS, and digital labelling

Opening: 16 January 2025
Deadline (short proposal): 23 April 2025
Deadline (full proposal): 14 October 2025

IHI call 10 will be a standard, two-stage call for proposals in early 2025 with the following topics:

• Topic 1: Digital label: one source of comprehensive information for medical technology products
• Topic 2: Enabling and safeguarding innovation in secondary use of health data in the European Health Data Space (EHDS)
• Topic 3: Per- and Poly-fluoroalkyl substance (PFAS) exposure, emissions, and end of life management in the healthcare sector

View the final call 10 text

Online info sessions from January 7-16 will address all call topics plus the rules and procedures. For contributing partners, a special info session on January 30 will provide an in-depth exploration of the key aspects of becoming an IHI contributing partner.

CR-p-24-38

Development of European guidelines and quality assurance scheme for gastric cancer prevention and care and preparing the third report on the status of implementation of the Council Recommendations on cancer screening

Indicative budget: € 6.5 million
Opening: TBD
Deadline(s): TBD

Keywords: guideline and quality assurance scheme, cancer prevention, cancer screening

Expected Outcome

The expected results are the following:

On gastric cancer prevention and care:
a) an established Working Group (expert panel) and conflict of interest assessments;
b) final results of the epidemiological analysis;
c) scoping of the development of the Commission’s initiative on gastric cancer;
d) development of risk assessment-model for gastric cancer guidelines;
e) mapping of healthcare questions, available requirements and indicators on gastric cancer care;
f) systematic reviews and evidence to decision frameworks;
g) risk-based gastric cancer guidelines for primary prevention, screening and diagnosis;
h) requirements and indicators covering the entire care pathway;
i) quality assurance scheme manual that defines the accredited certification process in line with EC Regulation 765/2008 and the service requirements and indicators.

All outcomes will be published on the Commission’s web hub hosted at the JRC for European guidelines and European quality assurance schemes within the context of organised and population-based screening programmes. This action will result in ‘European guidelines for gastric cancer prevention, screening and diagnosis’ and a ‘European quality assurance scheme for gastric cancer prevention, screening and care’ to support Member States to further design, plan, and implement population-based and targeted gastric cancer screenings and diagnosis where applicable.

As regards the cancer screening report:
a) an established Working Group (panel of experts from different countries having access to cancer screening data) and conflict of interest assessments;
b) Working Group members trained to be able to apply the data tools available through ECIS platform for data collection and submission;
c) the collection and validation of information and data from different Member States and associated countries to report status, organisation and performance of screening programmes for breast, cervical, colorectal and lung cancer screening;
d) collaboration with ongoing projects of the Commission established to collect information and data from the pilot prostate and gastric cancer screening programmes;
e) collaboration with ongoing projects of the Commission established to develop indicators and data collection tools for risk-based approach to cancer screening and data collected from any such pilots;
f) the 3rd report on the implementation of Council recommendation of 9 December 2022 on strengthening prevention through early detection: A new EU approach on cancer screening replacing Council Recommendation 2003/878/EC prepared to include status,
organisation and performance of breast, cervical, colorectal, lung, prostate and gastric cancer screening in the EU/EEA and associated countries;
g) status of utilization of quality assurance scheme and the certification process is included in the report.

Scope

The objectives and activities will cover:

On gastric cancer prevention and care:
The overall aim is the development of evidence-based European guidelines, and a quality assurance schemes for particular consideration by those Member States with highest gastric cancer incidence and death rates allowing for a step-wise and gradual roll-out. The methodology developed in previous initiatives such as the Commission Initiative on Breast Cancer and on Colorectal Cancer should be applied. Preliminary analysis should be conducted on the  epidemiological situation in Member States (and potentially also associated countries) to pursue a risk-based screening approach across the Union for the definition of the overall scope (e.g.,
indications of pathologies and targeted population) for the Commission Initiative on Gastric cancer.
On the cancer screening report:
The overall aim is the preparation of the 3rd Report on the Implementation of the Council Recommendation on cancer screening including to educate and guide the cancer screening programme managers to collect and submit cancer screening performance data using the new data collection tools to be able to estimate the new set of performance indicators. The project will target EU/EEA countries and associated countries to support collection of high-quality data across the cancer screening continuum for ongoing programme monitoring and quality improvement.

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