European Joint Programme on Rare Diseases (EJP RD)

The call Development of new analytic tools and pathways to accelerate diagnosis and facilitate diagnostic monitoring of rare diseases has been launched by the ten Joint Transnational Calls for rare diseases research projects previously by the ERA-Net E-Rare since 2006 and will involve 27 funding organisations from 21 countries.

Research proposals should cover at least one of the following areas:

1. Phenotype-driven diagnosis: integration across different ontologies, integration of shared pathways, digital phenotyping, development of artificial intelligence approaches/applications to extract health related data in aid of diagnosis;
2. Prognostic markers/biomarkers investigations for early diagnosis and monitoring;
3. Methodologies for solving cases that are currently difficult to analyze due to different underlying mechanisms (e.g. mosaicism, genomic (non-coding) alterations, gene regulation, complex inheritance), including new genomics / functional genomics technologies, multi-omics, mathematics, biostatistics, bioinformatics and artificial intelligence approaches;
4. Functional strategies to globally stratify variants of unknown significance (VUS) for clinical use; setting up of (in vitro) systems to distinguish between VUS and pathogenic variants (e.g. confirming disruption of splicing for deep intronic variants, loss of protein function, and gain of toxic protein function);
5. Development of pathway models to enable diagnosis, especially for newly discovered diseases that may share underlying molecular mechanisms with already known diseases.

Funding organisation in Spain: National Institute of Health Carlos III (ISCIII).

Deadline for preproposal: 16/02/2022.

Deadline for full proposal: 15/06/2022.