Legal entities based in all countries associated to Horizon Europe, including Canada, Switzerland, the UK, and South Korea, will be eligible to receive funding under this call, in line with the normal rules.

In order for a consortium to be considered eligible, it should include at least one independent legal entity established in a EU Member State, and at least two other independent legal entities, each established in different Member States or associated countries (this includes the UK).

If you are interested in one of the topics and would like to find a collaboration partner, our European team can help you find eligible partners to form a consortium.

Our Innovate UK European Team and UK National Contact Points can support you with these exciting potential funding opportunities and help you get the most out of Horizon Europe.

This call topic responds to the pressing need for a collaborative approach to accelerating the research-tomarket pathway and fostering innovation and competitiveness in the European healthcare sector. Accordingly, the action under this topic must contribute to all of the following outcomes:

1. A sustainable European HealthCare Incubator Network (hereafter, the ‘Network’) linking incubators from the public sector (academia, foundations etc.) and industry (pharma, medtech, biotech) to leverage and catalyse otherwise fragmented efforts and increase the reach of early-stage healthcare companies and academic players across Europe. By providing tailored mentorship and networking, resources and funding mechanisms, the Network will identify high-potential innovations and establish clear pathways for the scale-up and sustainable development of early-stage healthcare companies, supporting the next wave of European innovations.

2. A strong programme for de-risking pipelines and mentoring high potential start-ups, with the objective of making start-ups more attractive as investment propositions, and more capable of attracting essential scale-up finance through private or public investors. This should be achieved by leveraging the Network’s unique access to multi-sectorial corporate expertise and mentorship from multiple large-cap companies with tailored funding.

3. An agile framework for funding promising start-ups through the mechanism of Financial Support to Third Parties (‘FSTP’ or ‘cascade funding’).

4. Access to high-quality services and infrastructures, provided by the consortium, to accelerate the most promising innovations.

5. A framework of collaboration with other relevant funding and innovation programmes (e.g. the European Innovation Council (EIC), EIT Health, and national and regional initiatives) to raise selected start-ups’ awareness of potential future additional opportunities for support.

6. An ‘industry quality seal’ marking industry-validated promising start-ups, de-risked and connected to potential future funders and venture capital funds, that should enhance their ability to secure follow‑on financing and successful further development.

7. New opportunities for strategic partnerships between selected start-ups and partner companies, incubators, investors, venture capital funds, and other interested third parties.

8. A portfolio of early-stage companies with improved business, market and technological readiness.

This is achieved through targeted access to expertise, infrastructure and services, mentorship, training, and FSTP-supported resources, culminating in sustainable innovations that can be implemented at scale. The immediate and direct relationship between start-ups and the Network creates not only a support mechanism for start-ups, but also a coordinated platform delivering high value, non-financial industrial expertise that is not available through existing EU funding instruments.

For full details, read the call text.

The action under this topic must contribute to all of the following outcomes:

1. A validated Artificial Intelligence (AI) Foundation Toxicology Model (a large-scale, pre-trained machine learning system that learns generalisable representations of toxicological biology and chemistry from diverse, multimodal datasets, enabling broad applicability across safety assessment tasks with minimal task-specific training) that provides transparent probabilistic predictions for industry and regulator stakeholders to determine when a second species in chronic (>90 days) and sub-chronic (90 days) small molecule medicine repeat-dose studies is unlikely to provide additional safety relevant information, including risks of missed toxicity, organ-specific findings, and divergence in No Observed Adverse Effect Level (NOAEL). The goal would be to enable waiving the need for two-species chronic testing for small molecules and other modalities e.g. oligonucleotides.

2. A standardised, transparent weight-of-evidence framework for industry, regulator and academic stakeholders that enables reproducible assessment of evidence quality, consistency, relevance, and uncertainty across regulatory submissions, supporting the wider adoption of the AI Foundation Toxicology Model and New Approach Methodology (NAM)-based toxicology strategies in general.

3. Functional tools, templates, and training materials that support the real-world implementation, sustainability and evolution of the foundation model and weight-of-evidence framework including guidance on explainability, provenance, governance, ethical use, and alignment with AI requirements, tailored to industry, regulator and academic stakeholder needs.

4. Enhanced industry and regulator stakeholder confidence in second species waiver applications, particularly for small molecule medicines, supported by empirical, calibrated evidence and a framework enabling predictable adjudication, more consistent global waiver decision-making and timely progression of medicine development without compromising patient safety. This confidence should be gained through the model and framework’s application for regulator validation and acceptance, with the longer-term goal, beyond the action’s scope, of a revision of the regulatory guidelines ICH M3(R2) taking onboard the future project’s outcomes. This topic should provide the opportunity to extend this confidence to waiving chronic testing in a single species beyond small molecule medicines and to other study types.

For full details, read the call text.

The action under this topic must contribute to all of the following outcomes:

1. Researchers will benefit from a better understanding of the potential causal links between chronic inflammatory diseases and biological ageing, and the predictiveness of the accompanying biomarkers could allow for the definition of precise risk profiles for age-associated immune disease onset and exacerbations.

2. Patients will benefit from new early detection strategies as well as new diagnostic approaches to differentiate disease onset in elderly people from onset in younger adults. This will inform a personalised medicine approach to treatment and will in turn help to prevent disease progression.

3. Patients and healthcare professionals will benefit from the repurposing or development of novel therapies for ageing populations with chronic inflammatory diseases and precision medicine approaches that prevent health decline while reducing healthcare costs.

4. Researchers and industry will benefit from the establishment of systematic collaborative approaches for the use of available biobanks across age ranges, immune diseases and comorbidities to adopt innovative approaches (by integration of multi-omics, immunophenotyping, digital biomarkers, ageing clocks, and artificial intelligence (AI) with comprehensive patient information).

5. Patients and healthcare professionals will benefit from deeper insights into treatment response and the evaluation of the impact of ageing on treatment effectiveness.

6. Industry and researchers will benefit from the establishment of regulatory pathways for novel intervention strategies and biomarkers, leading to the faster clinical development of drugs that improve age-associated disease exacerbations, ultimately enabling the translation of research findings into therapeutic solutions for vulnerable patient populations. This includes the field of digital biomarkers and their use in monitoring activity, strength and fatigue as exemplary readouts.

For full details, read the call text.

The IHI Call Days for IHI call 13 took place from 24 to 30 June 2026 online and included sessions on the individual topics as well as the rules and procedures. Click here to view all recordings and presentations from the call days.

Our Innovate UK European Team and UK National Contact Points can support you with these exciting potential funding opportunities and help you get the most out of Horizon Europe.