Cluster 1 “Health”

These calls will support ambitious, collaborative projects that tackle Europe's most pressing health challenges. With a wide range of topics across key Destinations, there's a wealth of opportunities for researchers, innovators, and stakeholders across the health ecosystem. Whether your work addresses prevention, diagnosis, treatment, or healthcare delivery, there’s a Horizon Europe opportunity for you.

Explore the Full List of Cluster 1 – Health Topics:

✔  Staying healthy in a rapidly changing society;
✔  Living and working in a health-promoting environment;
✔  Tackling diseases and reducing disease burden;
✔  Developing and using new tools, technologies and digital solutions for a healthy society;
✔  Maintaining an innovative, sustainable, and competitive EU health industry;
✔  Ensuring equal access to innovative, sustainable, and high-quality healthcare.

The goal of the Mission on Cancer is to improve the lives of more than 3 million people by 2030, through prevention, cure and for those affected by cancer including their families, to live longer and better.

The four Cancer Mission objectives are:

✔  Understand;
✔  Prevent what is preventable;
✔  Optimise diagnosis and treatment;
✔  Support quality of life.

Its five transversal priorities are: ensure equitable access in all aforementioned areas, innovation, childhood cancer, personalised medicine and citizen engagement.

We’re also highlighting a selection of transformative topics from Cluster 6, focused on:

🌿 Biodiversity and ecosystem services (BIODIV);

♻️ Circular economy and bioeconomy sectors (CIRBIO);
♻️ Clean environment and zero pollution (ZEROPOULLTION);
🌱 Fair, healthy and environment-friendly food systems from primary production to consumption (FARM2FORK).

EIC Pathfinder is part of the European Innovation Council (EIC), designed to fund early-stage, high-risk / high-gain research that can pave the way to breakthrough technologies.
Within Pathfinder, the Open call is the “bottom-up” strand: it welcomes proposals in any field of science, technology or application, without predefined thematic priorities.
The 2026 Challenges Call includes three cutting-edge thematic strands that seek to push the frontiers of science and enable transformative technology development:

• II.2.1 Advanced Materials for Miniaturised Energy Harvesting Systems — This topic invites proposals to develop novel materials and device architectures that can efficiently scavenge ambient energy at microscale. The ambition is to enable self-powered miniaturised systems (e.g. IoT devices, sensors, wearable electronics) through breakthroughs in material properties, integration strategies, and energy conversion techniques.
• II.2.2 Biotechnology for Healthy Ageing — This theme focuses on leveraging biotechnology, bioengineering and life-science innovations to promote longer, healthier lifespans. It aims to address biological aging processes, preventative diagnostics, regenerative therapies, and interventions that maintain functional resilience over time.
• II.2.3 DeepRAP: Deep Reasoning, Abstraction & Planning towards Trustworthy Cognitive AI Systems — Under this call, the goal is to advance the methodological foundations of AI by combining deep learning with symbolic reasoning, abstraction, planning and verification. The ambition is to build more trustworthy, interpretable, and robust cognitive systems that can operate reliably in complex, uncertain environments.

EIC Pathfinder targets work in the earliest Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs), typically TRL 1 to TRL 4 — i.e. from basic research up to proof-of-concept / lab validation.

Download the DRAFT WorkProgramme
EIC-Work-Programme-2026_thirddraft_ISC_170725.pdf