IHI pioneered the applicant-driven approach in IHI call 9, which was launched in January 2025. While previous IHI calls for proposals set out the challenges to be addressed, IHI call 9 invited applicants to identify opportunities in the IHI Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) and turn them into proposals for IHI projects.
The first nine projects resulting from the call started at the beginning of 2026, and they address a broad range of challenges in health research, from early stage drug discovery and clinical trial design to improving patient care. They also tackle a wide array of disease areas, including Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular disease, and antimicrobial resistance.
LIGAND-AI: Using computer power to speed up drug discovery
The earliest stages of drug discovery entail finding a “chemical probe” – a small molecule that can bind to a protein and change how that protein behaves. Today, finding chemical probes usually involves testing large chemical libraries in the laboratory to identify “hits”, but this approach is slow and costly and many human proteins still lack a probe. LIGAND-AI aims to draw on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to hunt for promising hits, reducing the time and cost needed to explore proteins that currently have no chemical probes.
ACCESS-AD: Advancing the diagnosis and care of Alzheimer’s disease
Recent years have seen the development of treatments (or ‘disease-modifying therapies’, or DMTs) capable of slowing the progress of Alzheimer’s disease for certain groups of patients. However getting the right treatments to the right patients remains difficult. ACCESS-AD’s goal is to deliver tools and strategies that will help European healthcare systems to identify solutions that will enhance the care of people living with Alzheimer’s disease, from diagnostic and monitoring tools to lifestyle interventions and new DMTs, and deploy them at the scale needed.
AF-B-STEP: Better care for people with a common heart condition
Atrial fibrillation (AF) describes an irregular heart rhythm that can cause severe symptoms including palpitations, fatigue, chest pain, shortness of breath, and difficulties exercising. Today, AF is diagnosed in a binary fashion – you either have it or you don’t – although we know that the burden of the disease (and its impact) varies immensely from one patient to another. AF-B-STEP aims to define and quantify AF burden and its impact on health outcomes, and to set out standards for AF burden reporting by cardiac implanted electronics devices and consumer wearables. The hope is that this will trigger a step change in the diagnosis and care of people living with AF.
END2AMR: Reinvigorating the antimicrobial drug development pipeline
We urgently need innovative treatments for drug-resistant infections, but developing new antimicrobials is incredibly difficult; just 3 new classes of antibiotics were brought to the market in the last 30 years. As its name suggests, END2AMR has set itself the ambitious goal of reinvigorating the antimicrobial drug development pipeline by delivering innovative approaches to treating resistant infections. The project will focus on both new treatment modalities and new drug delivery technologies.
GENz-trials: Deploying data science and AI to transform clinical trials
Clinical trials are seen as the gold standard for evaluating the safety, efficacy, and cost-effectiveness of many medical products including medicines, medical devices and diagnostic tests. However, setting up and running a clinical trial is far from easy. The aim of GENz-trials is to harness the power of data science and artificial intelligence (AI) to address these challenges and transform the way clinical trials are designed, carried out, and evaluated.
GUIDE-AI: Harnessing AI to ensure patients receive the best care
For most chronic conditions, treatment guidelines detail what medicines patients should receive and when. However, it is increasingly difficult for doctors to keep up to date with all the guidelines, and studies show that just a fraction of chronic disease patients are treated according to the guidelines for their condition. The ultimate goal of GUIDE-AI is to harness the power of generative artificial intelligence (AI) to boost the proportion of chronically ill patients receiving the treatments as set out in the guidelines.
HospitalAtHome: Bringing hospital level care into the home
Long-term health problems are responsible for two-thirds of hospital bed occupancy in Europe. But what if we could shorten or even avoid some hospitalisations entirely by moving the patient’s care from the hospital to the home? HospitalAtHome aims to create a model where patients can receive personalised, hospital-level treatment at home, thanks to intelligent, connected systems and devices that ensure the safety, quality and continuity of care. The successful completion of the project could trigger a major transformation in health care delivery.
SEISMIC: Developing minimally-invasive, image-guided techniques for neurosurgery
In many fields, surgeons increasingly use minimally-invasive techniques to carry out operations – incisions are kept to a minimum, and surgeons are guided in their work by imaging technologies that show what is happening inside the patient in real time. In contrast, neurosurgery still typically entails making large openings in the skull, and attempts to integrate imaging technology into neurosurgery procedures are hampered by costs and logistics. As a result, patients are still undergoing operations where the risk of complications is high. SEISMIC aims to improve patient care by working out how to seamlessly integrate medical imaging technologies into minimally invasive neurosurgery techniques.
PreciseOnco: Putting precision at the heart of cancer care
Growing numbers of cancer patients now benefit from an approach called interventional oncology (IO), in which miniaturised instruments are inserted into the patient’s body via minimally invasive access routes. The miniaturised instruments are guided to the tumour with the help of imaging techniques; once there, the treatment can be applied directly and precisely to the tumour. The aim of PreciseOnco is to boost the interventional oncology field by integrating cutting-edge spectral imaging, motion correction technologies and robotic assistance to enhance the precision and safety of IO procedures.
More projects in the pipeline...
More IHI call 9 projects are in the pipeline and will get started soon, so watch this space! Meanwhile, IHI’s latest applicant-driven call for proposals, IHI call 12, is now open for applications.