On December 10, 2025, ERDERA will launch its 2026 Joint Transnational Call, “Solving unsolved cases of rare genetic and non-genetic diseases through variant validation and novel technological approaches.”
ERDERA, the European Alliance for Rare Disease Research, is a European partnership with over 170 public and private organizations from 37 countries. ERDERA aims to transform cutting-edge science into tangible benefits for the thirty million Europeans living with a rare disease.
The aim of this call is to solve undiagnosed rare genetic diseases and to face complex and multifactorial non-genetic rare diseases, identifying causal variants in patients without a molecular diagnosis after previous genetic or genomic testing and providing diagnostic clarity for conditions of unknown or mixed pathogenesis.
Suggested areas of interest are:
- Functional validation to classify variants of uncertain significance (VUS) and increase the diversity of functional genomics research, or validation of candidate VUS to improve outcomes for a broader range of patients using in silico, in vitro systems, or animal models (e.g., CRISPR-edited cells, iPSCs, organoids, etc.);
- Using multi-omics or integrative methods (e.g., transcriptomics, epigenomics, etc.) to resolve ambiguous or complex variants;
- New tools/methodologies not yet validated in the clinical setting, including biostatistics, advanced bioinformatics, and mathematical approaches (e.g., variant effect predictors, artificial intelligence (AI)-based annotation platforms, etc.);
- Systems biology and disease mechanism modeling;
- Integration of clinical, environmental, lifestyle and sensor-derived data;
- Developing knowledge graphs or disease maps to link phenotypic and mechanistic information;
- Use of advanced artificial intelligence and modeling tools (graph ML, probabilistic causal models).
Research groups working at universities or other higher education institutions or research institutes, research teams working in hospitals and other healthcare settings and organizations, businesses, and patient advocacy organizations (PAOs) are eligible to participate.
Each consortium submitting a proposal must involve four to six eligible lead research partners from at least four different participating countries. In specific cases, the number of consortium partners may be increased to eight. No more than two eligible partners from the same country may be present in each consortium.
The deadlines for submitting the proposal are set for February 12, 2026 (1st stage) and the 8 July 2026 (2nd stage).
For more information: info@iniziativa.cc
