The ERA4Health Partnership 2026 Call “Preventing and Understanding Overweight and Obesity (PREVENT-OO)” is Now Open for Applications

25 Nov 2025

The ERA4Health Partnership has announced its new Joint Transnational Call for the year 2026, with an aim to understand and prevent overweight and obesity.

The new Joint Transnational Call (JTC8), launched by the ERA4Health Partnership, has been announced under the title “Preventing and Understanding Overweight and Obesity (PREVENT-OO)”. This call aims to support projects that conduct an in-depth investigation to prevent and understand overweight and obesity. ERA4Health, via this call, encourages the development of preventive and therapeutic strategies—covering areas such as public health and policy development— by supporting international and multidisciplinary collaborations that investigate the causes of obesity and overweight and their complications. International research teams are also expected to develop new treatment approaches and solutions by gaining a better understanding of these interactions.

The aim of this call is to support research that:

Improves the understanding of the causes for obesity, overweight and its complications by using a mechanistic approach.
Focuses on prevention and public health strategies for critical transitional periods of life.

And more specifically:

1a. Investigates biological mechanisms, including chronobiological, genetic and/or epigenetic mechanisms, underlying the onset and progression of overweight and obesity, and related diseases. Secondary factors with potential influence on the biological mechanisms such as the living environment, lifestyle or psychological status should also be considered where relevant.
1b. Investigates how overweight and obesity contribute to the development of related clinical complications and/or affect the mechanism of action of therapeutics against other diseases/disorders.

Both subtopics 2a. and 2b. should be addressed for critical transitional periods of life only. The choice of the critical transitional periods of life to be studied must be clearly justified in the proposal. It should be due to biological changes (e.g. postpartum, menopause, andropause), or socio-environmental changes (e.g. period in between pregnancies, diagnosis of a chronic disease, recovering from disease, retirement etc.).

And more specifically:

2a. Understands and addresses neglected determinants, including their interdependency, in the onset and the progression of overweight and obesity in transitional periods of life.
2b. Develops novel tools or preventive strategies that can be implemented against the onset and the progression of overweight and obesity in transitional periods of life taking into consideration physiological, pathophysiological, psychological behavioral influences and/or socioeconomic status of the citizens/patients. Importantly, the proposal should present the assessment of the economic impact of the proposed tools or strategies on the healthcare system and issue orientations that will help policymakers to define new regulations and guidelines to prevent overweight and obesity.

In addition to submitting project applications to the call secretariat, it is mandatory for researchers from Türkiye participating in the projects to also submit a national project application to TÜBİTAK. Project proposals submitted from Türkiye under this call will be supported through TÜBİTAK's 1071 Support Programme for Increasing Capacity to Benefit from International Research Funds and Participation in International R&D Cooperation. Failure to comply with the application rules may result in the application being returned without evaluation. Therefore, it is essential to thoroughly review the national application rules before submission.

For more information about the call and to access the webinar recording you can visit the call webpage via this link.

Applications: