Introduction: The InterHeart 2025 call aims to support research that builds our understanding of the molecular and cellular mechanisms governing interactions between the cardiovascular system and other organs/systems when at least one of the two presents a pathological state.

General Description: This call focuses on expanding knowledge and understanding of:

• How cardiovascular diseases (CVD) affect the performance of other organs/systems and/or their capacity to respond to treatments.
• How disorders other than CVD affect cardiovascular system performance, including response to treatments.
• How treatment for disorders other than CVD affects the performance of the cardiovascular system.

Objectives:

• Build a comprehensive approach to understanding cardiovascular disease interactions, combining basic research, clinical translation, and digital innovation through international collaboration.
• Enable transnational collaboration of multidisciplinary scientists from different countries to work together across borders, leveraging diverse patient populations and data sets.

Approaches:

• Mechanistic/experimental research.
• Identification and validation of biomarkers of organs/systems/disorders crosstalk (including epigenetics biomarkers).
• Generation of digital models of disease(s) to study disease-disease or disease-drug interactions.

Exclusion:

• Except for small-scale clinical studies up to phase 2, all other clinical studies are excluded in this call,
• Proposals which are not dealing with the cardiovascular system or CVD,
• Proposals that only study the cardiovascular system or CVD without studying the interaction with other organs, systems, diseases or the response to their treatment,
• Studies on how CVD treatments affect the performance of other system/organs,
• Development of therapeutics,
• Infectious diseases, even if studied with CVD.

Project Duration: 36 months.

Call Phases:

• Pre-proposal phase.
• Full-proposal phase.

General Eligibility:

• Joint research proposals may be submitted by applicants from academia, clinical/public health sector, enterprises, and operational stakeholders.
• Only transnational projects will be funded.
• Consortia must include a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 5 eligible partners from at least 3 different countries participating in the call.
• The maximum number of eligible partners can be increased up to six or seven if they include one or two partners, respectively, from underrepresented countries (Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia).
• No more than 2 eligible partners from the same country.
• A maximum of 2 collaborators (self-funded partners not applying for funding).

Conditions:

• Project partners will be funded by their relevant national/regional funding organization.
• Eligible costs and funding rules vary between the respective funding organizations.
• There will be a two-step submission and evaluation procedure for joint applications, i.e., pre-proposals and full proposals, complemented by a rebuttal stage.
• For both submission steps, one joint proposal document (in English) shall be prepared by the partners of a joint transnational proposal and must be submitted on the electronic submission system by the project coordinator.

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