European Partnership for Brain Health (EP BrainHealth)

European Partnership dedicated to improving brain health by developing scientific knowledge as a foundation to promote brain health throughout the lifetime, to prevent and to cure brain diseases and to improve wellbeing of people living with neurological and mental disorders in Europe and beyond.

The European Partnership for Brain Health Medicine (EP BrainHealth) is a European Partnership under Horizon Europe. The partnership will launch in early 2026 to address the challenge of promoting and preserving brain health and reducing the burden posed by brain disorders, which include neurological, neurosensory and mental aspects, and their consequences for patients, families, caregivers, healthcare systems and society.

The partnership builds on previous and current European transnational initiatives supported by the European Commission, including the Network of European Funding for Neuroscience Research (ERA-NET NEURON), the EU Joint Programme for Neurodegenerative Disease Research (JPND), and the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Flagship Human Brain Project (HBP) and its follow-up network of European infrastructures EBRAINS and EBRAINS 2.0. Additionally, the Coordination and Support Action (CSA) European Brain Research Area (EBRA) was supported by the EU as a first step to create synergies among these European initiatives together with the European Brain Council (EBC).

EP BrainHealth is guided by its Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA), which sets out the following four priorities with specific objectives and strategies to accelerate scientific and medical breakthroughs and innovation in the brain space with the expected societal impact of decreasing the burden of brain disorders:

• Promoting brain health and preventing disorders to identify brain health determinants and promote early prevention strategies across the lifespan.
• Improving early detection, treatment and care for timely detection of brain disorders and innovative, personalised, therapeutic strategies – including digital and AI-powered tools.
• Enhancing care and support to accelerate the translation of research into clinical practice, enable patient engagement in research and foster access to treatment.
• Addressing social, ethical, and legal issues affecting brain health to develop guidelines for responsible innovation and care.

In addition, the following cross-cutting activities have been identified, accounting for the specificities and existing gaps of the brain health field:

• Improve translation to the market of brain health innovation and socio-economic aspects.
• Framework, better use of infrastructures, and data access for brain health.
• Increase harmonisation and standardisation of brain research results with the goal of promoting reproducibility.
• Participative research: involving citizens, including patients and caregivers.
• Ethical and legal aspects of brain health science.
• Training for new generations of researchers with a transdisciplinary perspective.
• Perspectives on tailored interventions for brain health.

In order to realise these ambitions, EP BrainHealth will implement a series of dedicated measures and potential tools, including calls for collaborative, interdisciplinary and transnational research project funding, the encouragement of increased transnational collaborations and networks, the improvement of translation and the development of capacity building for research and innovation.

A global approach towards international organisations and networks is needed to combine forces for the huge task of preserving and improving brain health. Global players will be actively involved in the partnership by seeking input from key international organisations on brain research priorities, taking into account their views and opinions on crosscutting pressing issues, and including them in terms of joint activities at the highest possible levels of commitment.

One of the core activities of EP BrainHealth is to advance the collective knowledge about brain health through funding of transnational calls via diverse instruments, including Joint Transnational Calls (JTCs). The principle of JTCs is to facilitate synergies between excellent research groups from different countries working on a collaborative interdisciplinary project. Research groups are expected to share their complementary expertise in the best interest of public healthcare systems.