The European Commission (DG Health) has launched a new call for proposals for a pilot project in the area of Rare Diseases. This will be founded by the European 3rd Health Programme.

PP-2-1-2016 - Pilot project — Establishing a Registry of Rare Congenital Malformations (as part of the Rare Diseases Registry), drawing on the structure, organization and experience of the Registry of Congenital Malformations

• The key objective of this pilot project is to set up a registry of rare congenital malformations as a part of rare diseases national registers. The project should be implemented at a national level.
• The secondary aim of the project is to provide an example of how to extend an existing birth defects registration and surveillance system to a rare diseases registration system.
• The birth defects registration system has already been set up in several MSs as part of the EUROCAT surveillance network. The pilot project provides a model for exploring whether a birth defects registry can be extended to form a rare diseases registry.
• The pilot project should contribute to the development of an EU Platform on Rare Diseases Registration to provide a common access point to data collections on rare diseases across Europe and to be compatible with platform tools.

Opening: October 27th 2016
Deadline: January 31st 2017
Call document: here 
More information and link for submission here

The aim of the call is to enable scientists in different countries to build an effective collaboration on a common interdisciplinary research project based on complementarities and sharing of expertise, with a clear translational research approach. Projects shall involve a group of rare diseases or a single rare disease following the European definition i.e. a disease affecting not more than five in 10.000 persons in the European Community, EC associated states and Canada.

The specific objective of this call is to promote research projects focusing on the pre-clinical development of therapeutic approaches in suitable existing animal or cell models.

Date of publication: December 5th 

Deadline for proposal pre-registration: February 1, 2017

Deadline for proposal submission: June 2nd, 2017

More information here

Call document: here 

Call forms: here

Guidelines: here

Call identifier: ERC-2017-CoG

Deadline: February, 9th 2017

ERC Consolidator Grants are designed to support excellent Principal Investigators at the career stage at which they may still be consolidating their own independent research team or programme. Applicant Principal Investigators must demonstrate the ground-breaking nature, ambition and feasibility of their scientific proposal. Principal Investigator shall have been awarded his or her first PhD > 7 and ≤ 12 years prior to 1 January 2017. 

More information in the ERC 2017 Work Programme (pp. 23-24 on CoG)

Being nearly at the half-way point of the 3rd Health Programme which runs from 2014 to 2020, the Commission would like to evaluate whether it is meeting its objectives and whether there is room for improvement.

Answer here to the EU Consultation on the 3rd European Health Programme ! It is open to any interested parties in order to gather views and opinions on:

• The objectives and priorities of the 3HP, and the extent to which these are appropriate and in line with health needs in the EU
• The way the 3HP is implemented, and the extent to which this is effective and efficient
• The overall added value and usefulness of the 3HP

More info here

Aim: increase knowledge on rare diseases and develop clinical research

Eligibility: only applicants members of approved ERNs are eligible to be co-funded.

Scope: from at least 3 countries
Description: The activities to be carried out concern the creation of 3-4 new registries on rare diseases. These registries should constitute key instruments to increase knowledge on rare diseases and develop clinical research. Collaborative efforts to establish data collection and maintain them will be considered, provided that these resources are open and accessible. Registries should be built with the support and according to the standards set up by the European Platform on rare diseases registration and provide all necessary data to the Platform (taking the relevant data protection rules into account).

Call text: here

Budget: EUR 1.200.000 (indicative budgetary ceiling per grant to be awarded in 2017 is EUR 400.000, for 3 to 4 registries)

Deadline: March, 21^st

All information: here

If you follow a cohort of patients with FMD, and are willing to contribute to the European FMD registry and join a network of specialists interested by the clinical and basic aspects of the disease, please contact us (FMD-saintluc@uclouvain.be).

Read the call here

Topic Identification:  SC1-HCO-07-2017

Stay tuned: here

Topic identifier: SC1-HCO-03-2017
Types of action: ERA-NET-Cofund ERA-NET Cofund

This call should aim at implementing a key area of the PerMed Strategic Research Agenda and be complementary with other funding programmes and activities at European and international level. Proposers are encouraged to include other joint activities including additional joint calls without EU co-funding. This work should be informed by the output of the coordination and support action envisaged in topic SC1-HCO-05-2016 - Coordinating personalised medicine research, without duplicating any of its work.

The proposed ERA-NET should demonstrate the expected impact on national and transnational programmes as well as the leverage effect on European research and competitiveness, and should plan the development of key indicators for supporting this. Participation of international partners is highly encouraged.

The Commission considers that a proposal requesting a contribution from the EU of EUR 5 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

More information here

Topic identifier: SC1-PM-03-2017
Types of action: RIA Research and Innovation action

Deadline: 11 April 2017

The aim of this research should be to apply genomics and/or other –omics and/or other high-throughput approaches for the molecular characterisation of rare diseases in view of developing molecular diagnoses for a large number of undiagnosed rare diseases. Undiagnosed rare diseases may range from a group of unnamed disorders with common characteristics to a phenotypically well described disease or group of diseases with an unknown molecular basis. Genetic variability due to geographical distribution and/or different ethnicity should be taken into account as well as genotype-phenotype correlation whenever applicable. In addition, age, sex and gender aspects should be included where appropriate. This large-scale proposal should promote common standards and terminologies for rare disease classification and support appropriate bioinformatics tools and incentives to facilitate data sharing. Existing resources should be used for depositing data generated by this proposal. Molecular and/or functional characterisation may be part of the proposal to confirm diagnosis. The proposal should enable and foster scientific exchange between stakeholders from countries and regions with different practices and strategies of rare disease diagnostics.

The selected proposal shall contribute to the objectives of, and follow the guidelines and policies of the International Rare Diseases Research Consortium IRDiRC (www.irdirc.org).

The Commission considers that requesting a contribution from the EU of around EUR 15 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of a proposal requesting other amounts.

More information here

Topic identifier: SC1-HCO-08-2017
Types of action: CSA Coordination and support action

Any type of activities that can help less performing countries and regions to build capacities and exploit opportunities to eventually increase their participation in EU funded collaborative projects can be supported.

The proposals will propose concrete measures for tackling structural barriers to health research and innovation, including those related to capacity, skills, policy, regulatory environment, and economic and socio-cultural factors including gender equality issues and gender dimension in research content.

More information and call documents here

Topic identifier: SC1-PM-08-2017
Types of action: RIA Research and Innovation action

Deadline: April 11th 2017

Support will be provided to clinical trials on substances where orphan designation has been given by the European Commission, where the proposed clinical trial design takes into account recommendations from protocol assistance given by the European Medicines Agency, and where a clear patient recruitment strategy is presented. Clinical trials may focus on a range of interventions with an orphan designation, from small molecule to gene or cell therapy, may include novel interventions and/or repurposing of existing and known interventions. The intervention must have been granted the EU orphan designation at the latest on the date of the full proposal call closure. A concise feasibility assessment justified by available published and preliminary preclinical or clinical results and supporting data shall also be provided. Appropriate plans to engage with patient organisations, Member States health authorities and considerations of efficacy/potential clinical benefit as well as early indication on health economics should be integrated in the application. In addition to the clinical trial, proposals may also include limited elements of late stage preclinical research and/or experimental evaluation of potential risks which must be complementary/contribute to the clinical trial(s) carried out within the proposal. The centre of gravity must clearly be the clinical trial(s). The participation of SMEs is encouraged.

More information and call documents here

Topic identifier: SC1-PM-02-2017
Types of action: RIA Research and Innovation action

Deadline: April 11th 2017

Proposals should deliver novel concepts for disease-mechanism based patient stratification to address the needs for stratified or personalised therapeutic interventions. The proposals should integrate multidimensional and longitudinal data and harness the power of -omics, including pharmacogenomics, systems biomedicine approaches, network analysis and of computational modelling. The new concepts of stratification should be validated in pre-clinical and clinical studies taking into account sex and gender differences. Applicants are encouraged to actively involve patient associations. The proposals should consider regulatory aspects of clinical practice and commercialisation opportunities. Proposals should focus on complex diseases having high prevalence and high economic impact.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of between EUR 4 and 6 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

More information and call documents: here

Topic identifier: SC1-PM-10-2017
Types of action: RIA Research and Innovation action

Deadline: April 11th 2017

Proposals should compare the use of currently available preventative or therapeutic (pharmacological as well as non-pharmacological) healthcare interventions in adults[1]. While there is no restriction on the diseases or interventions to be the focus of proposals, preference will be given to proposals focusing on interventions with high public health relevance and socio-economic impact, i.e. interventions addressing conditions that are particularly frequent, may lead to co-morbidities, have a high negative impact on the quality of life of the individual and/or are associated with significant costs or where savings can be achieved. A cost effectiveness analysis must be included. Given the focus on existing interventions, proposals will aim to contribute to improve interventions, take decisions about the discontinuation of interventions that are less effective or less cost-effective than others, and make recommendations on the most effective and cost-effective approaches. A comprehensive array of clinical and safety parameters, as well as health and socio-economic outcomes (e.g. quality of life, patient mortality, morbidity, costs, and performance of the health systems) for chosen populations should be assessed. Agreed core outcome sets (COS) should be used as endpoints in conditions where they already exist, in other cases efforts should be made to agree on such COS. Randomised controlled trials, pragmatic trials, observational studies, large scale databases and meta-analyses may be considered for this topic. Where relevant the study population should address gender as well as socio-economic differentials in health and/or any other factors that affect health equity.

More information and call documents here

Topic identifier: SC1-PM-20-2017
Types of action: RIA Research and Innovation action

Deadline: April 11th 2017

More information and call documents here

Call identifier: ERC-2017-AdG

ERC Advanced Grant Principal Investigators are expected to be active researchers and to have a track record of significant research achievements in the last 10 years which must be presented in the application. There is little prospect of an application succeeding in the absence of such a record, which identifies investigators as exceptional leaders in terms of originality and significance of their research contributions.

More information in the ERC Work Programme 2017 (pp. 25-28 on AdG)