Multimodal Access and Interactive Data Representation

The Horizon Europe 2026 Cluster 1 Health work programme funds Virtual Human Twin (VHT) projects that combine AI, multimodal patient data, mechanistic biological models, and high-performance computing to build personalized virtual representations of cancer patients for diagnostics, treatment planning, and therapy response prediction. The VHT initiative supports interdisciplinary consortia developing AI-driven digital twins of cancer patients integrating imaging, genomics, proteomics, electronic health records, and physiological measurements with mechanistic and machine learning models. Funded projects must demonstrate clinical validation pathways and integration with European Health Data Space infrastructure. The cancer-focused VHT calls are part of the European Commission's broader €14 billion Horizon Europe 2026-2027 Work Programme adopted December 11, 2025, with at least 35% of the total budget (approximately €4.9 billion) dedicated to climate and health priorities. Cancer Mission calls close September 15, 2026 at 17:00 CET.

The PRIMED-AI Validation Center is a single-award opportunity to build the independent evaluation infrastructure for the entire NIH Common Fund PRIMED-AI program. Its function is to serve as a dedicated hub that verifies, validates and characterizes the AI-enabled, image-based multimodal clinical decision support tools produced by other PRIMED-AI awardees, assessing reliability, reproducibility and generalizability with an eye toward clinical adoption. This is a structurally different proposition from a research grant and applicants should read it that way: the Center is a service and methods organization accountable to a consortium, not a lab pursuing its own scientific agenda. Competitive applicants will need existing capacity in AI model evaluation, access to diverse and independent clinical validation datasets spanning multiple sites and populations, expertise in regulatory science given the Software as a Medical Device framing of the tools being evaluated, and the organizational maturity to run a benchmarking operation on someone else's timeline. Because only one award is expected, this is a winner-take-all competition, and the budget structure is notably front-loaded in an unusual way - $2,000,000 in direct costs in year one rising to as much as $3,200,000 per year thereafter, making this among the largest single awards in the PRIMED-AI portfolio. Foreign organizations and foreign components are not eligible, unlike the program's tool-development announcements. Institutions that intend to submit tool-development applications under RFA-RM-27-012 or RFA-RM-27-013 should think carefully about the independence expectations before also competing for the Validation Center role. The October 2, 2026 deadline is shared with the Logistics Center announcement (RFA-RM-27-015), the program's companion coordinating infrastructure award.