Federica Zanca and Orsolya Symmons, Programme Managers for the European Innovation Council, spoke with The Innovation Platform’s Maddie Hall to share the work of the EIC Pathfinder programme and its promise for advancing next-generation healthcare technologies.
The European Innovation Council (EIC) is leading the way in advancing innovation across Europe by identifying and supporting groundbreaking technologies from initial concepts to market entry. The EIC Pathfinder is the first step in the EIC pathway, supporting early-stage, high-risk research and innovation at the forefront of science and technology.
To gain insights into the workings of the Pathfinder programme and explore its potential to deliver next-generation healthcare technologies, The Innovation Platform Editor, Maddie Hall, interviewed two Programme Managers involved in the EIC Pathfinder Programme. Federica Zanca leads the 2025 Pathfinder Challenge, titled ‘Generative AI-Based Agents to Revolutionise Medical Diagnosis and Treatment of Cancer’, aiming to integrate AI technologies into healthcare in a way that effectively supports clinicians throughout the entire clinical pathway. Meanwhile, Orsolya Symmons is leading the 2026 Challenge on ‘Biotechnology for Healthy Ageing,’ which seeks to merge decades of research on ageing with breakthroughs in biotechnology.
Sharing insights into their roles, Federica and Orsolya delve into the intricacies of their projects and examine how Pathfinder is positioned to support their ambitions. They highlighted the potential of deep tech and advanced technologies to drive positive change in the medical landscape.
Could you share a brief overview of yourselves and your roles as Programme Managers in the EIC?
F. As Programme Managers at the EIC, we act as brokers, connecting innovators, investors, clinicians, industry leaders, and policymakers. Specifically, I am responsible for shaping and steering the portfolio of medical technologies and AI in healthcare, aiming to translate deep tech into tangible impacts for patients and the healthcare system as a whole. Our role is to help shape challenge scopes and portfolio strategy, identify emerging trends, build a coherent portfolio across projects that address the same challenge, and actively guide them through the scientific, technological, regulatory, and clinical market landscapes.
O. Each programme manager is responsible for a specific area. For my part, I have worked as both a researcher and a biotech entrepreneur, as well as in research management, and now I oversee the health and biotechnology area at the EIC. We strive to bring strategic cohesion to our portfolio by connecting the entire pipeline of different EIC instruments from a technological perspective and engaging with various stakeholders.
Can you explain the EIC Pathfinder programme and its significance in supporting innovative health technologies? How does the EIC prioritise which technologies to support when selecting Pathfinder challenges, especially in a rapidly evolving field like healthcare innovation?
O. The EIC Pathfinder supports early-stage, high-risk, high-reward research at low Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs), up to proof-of-concept. Like all EIC programmes, Pathfinder has a strong focus on deep tech, aiming to tackle ideas that are too uncertain for traditional funding or private investment.
When designing challenges, we adopt a very integrative approach, determining whether the technology is a good fit for the Pathfinder Programme by assessing the technology itself, examining our existing portfolio, and evaluating the technological maturity of innovations in specific fields. To do this, we map our existing projects against horizon scanning, conduct desk research, and leverage our own background knowledge. To ensure we capture cutting-edge developments, we also use horizon scanning, expert input, and Commission-wide intelligence.
The EIC is primarily an innovation and product-focused instrument. Therefore, we investigate the barriers that could prevent these technologies from reaching the market. For instance, in the health sector, we aim to address technological challenges to overcome existing obstacles and to prioritise identifying unmet health needs and market potential to facilitate the future adoption of these technologies.
F. We focus primarily on transformative impact rather than short-term market readiness, planning for the next five to ten years, and anticipating future directions in healthcare. Our emphasis is on technology as the driving force, but we also address significant unmet clinical needs at the system level. The high-risk aspect means these breakthrough ideas might fail, but if they succeed, they could be game changers in the field.
Federica, you’re currently leading the 2025 Pathfinder Challenge, Generative AI-Based Agents to Revolutionise Medical Diagnosis and Treatment of Cancer. Can you provide an overview of the challenge and its objectives?
F. The call for Gen AI-based agents in cancer diagnosis and therapy aims to transform AI from an isolated tool into agentic decision-support systems that assist clinicians in complex environments, with clinicians retaining responsibility. Currently, cancer treatment decisions involve collaboration between doctors who each manage distinct data types, which can make it difficult to effectively synthesise data for patient care, particularly in rare cases.
The goal is to develop advanced AI systems capable of integrating multimodal data, such as images, genetic information, and diverse structured and unstructured clinical data. Unlike current AI tools in radiology that simply analyse images and produce static outputs, the next generation of systems will actively interact with clinicians, reason through complex data, and fit seamlessly into clinical workflows.
The project will address both technical and clinical challenges, seeking to create generative AI models that can be effectively applied in practice. At its core is the idea of revolutionising cancer diagnosis and treatment by moving from static AI to more interactive systems. The hope is that, in the process, we can lay the scientific and technological foundations for trustworthy AI, including transparency, robustness, and clinical validation, which is still an active area of development in many applications.
Could you tell us more about the projects within this Challenge and any progress so far? What’s next for them following their inclusion in the Challenge?
F. Ultimately, we fund a portfolio of projects rather than individual ones. Our main objective is to create a coherent and complementary portfolio that facilitates cross-fertilisation of technologies.
We are currently evaluating over 200 project applications for the Challenge, which has included a remote evaluation followed by a panel evaluation in February that will bring together a group of vice-chair panellists, including myself, to rank the projects that meet our set threshold.
Projects must meet evaluation thresholds and score highly; final selection also considers portfolio-level objectives (complementarity, coverage of the challenge scope), as described in the Work Programme. My focus is on ensuring the project portfolio includes diverse cancer types, various technologies, and applications across the clinical workflow, such as diagnosis and treatment.
Therefore, the highest-ranked projects may not be selected unless they provide diverse representation across cancer types and technologies, which is unlikely.
Following selection, the portfolio will collaboratively develop a strategic plan and establish common goals to effectively support the progress of all funded projects.
Have you encountered any issues in the adoption of AI technologies in clinical settings? Do you anticipate any specific challenges?
F. One of the key reasons for launching this challenge is the significant bottleneck in adopting these technologies, largely due to the fragmentation of tool-based AI. For instance, while there are AI applications specifically designed for lung cancer detection, cancer is not the only condition doctors consider when examining a patient’s chest. Therefore, despite AI assistance in one field, manual work is still required to address other potential conditions.
In this challenge, we aim to address fragmentation by developing a comprehensive tool that supports both diagnosis and treatment, supporting clinical decision-making across parts of the pathway (e.g., triage, diagnosis, treatment planning), integrated into workflows.
Another obstacle to adoption is the limited clinical trust and transparency associated with these tools, often perceived as black-box models. They often lack explainability, leading to resistance among medical professionals when they are used.
There is often a disconnect between AI developers and clinical workflows. Sometimes, these companies and tool developers are not closely familiar with clinical settings, which leads to the development of fantastic tools that fail to integrate effectively into the clinical processes, thereby limiting their utility.
Pathfinder is an important programme in scaling innovative ideas to commercialisation. Orsolya, you have experience in scaling up a biotech company. Can you provide some insights into the practicalities and challenges of this, particularly for biotech companies? How does Pathfinder help to address this challenge?
O. Challenges differ based on the technological area, the level of maturity, and the experience of the innovators involved. The main difficulties are usually not related to the technology development itself. Instead, the real obstacle frequently lies in getting people to view their technology as a product and to develop business strategies that capture a real market opportunity.
Innovators need to focus on understanding customer needs and on how they will address them, identifying their competitive advantage, and considering why no one else has solved this problem.
At the Pathfinder stage, this can require a shift in mindset as innovators establish proof of concept for their technology and prepare to transition from research in an academic environment to potentially starting their own companies. Accordingly, they also need to contemplate practical matters such as how to protect their innovations, how to build a business, who will own the innovation, and where the future funding will come from. In practice, Pathfinder is the first step to help facilitate this shift from a purely research-focused mindset to one that is oriented towards commercialisation.
In 2026, you’re leading the Pathfinder Challenge in Biotechnology for Healthy Ageing. Could you provide an overview of this Challenge and why it was selected?
O. The initiative is motivated by our ageing society and the culmination of decades of research that has established a solid scientific foundation for understanding the mechanisms of ageing. The field is now primed for translational advancements supported by technology. By focusing on this translational health aspect, the challenge complements previous funding calls by the European Commission, which tackled important areas, such as societal factors related to ageing, promoting digital solutions for the elderly, and investigating age-related disease progression.
The challenge is built on three pillars. One key focus addresses the fact that ageing often leads to multiple age-related diseases occurring simultaneously. We aim to explore technological interventions that target the underlying molecular and cellular pathways of ageing, ultimately developing health-based proof-of-concept studies for clinical interventions that would target the root cause of multiple age-related diseases, rather than tackling each disease individually.
Moreover, the challenge recognises that it’s not just about developing these interventions but also about applying them to the right person at the right time. In addition to seeking intervention projects, there are two additional pillars: one is the development of biomarkers to identify when interventions should be introduced and to track their effectiveness. The other is creating a toolkit, such as non-animal models, to assess these interventions in various settings, whether in animal models, in vitro (in a dish), or through digital means.
This portfolio approach fosters collaboration between those developing interventions and those focused on biomarkers, encouraging scientific exchange and public awareness of the ageing issue. The main challenge we anticipate concerns regulatory pathways, since ageing is not classified as a disease, which can complicate clinical trials.
What is the anticipated timeline for Challenge over the next year? Could you elaborate on what you hope to achieve and any preparation that’s already underway?
O. As is evident from both challenges, the timelines are lengthy. From the call’s opening to the project’s actual launch, it takes about a year and a half.
Overall, these Pathfinder projects will take approximately four to five years each to reach the proof-of-concept stage. However, we aim for these projects to be game changers for the entire field we are targeting. By having projects work together, we can create resources and foster acceptance of the innovations they are pursuing. This collaboration will help advance innovation and potentially streamline commercialisation processes, leading to a broader impact that extends beyond individual projects.
F. As we move forward, we would like to see the projects involved in Pathfinder transition into the next phase, EIC Transition, which typically takes two to three years, and then advance to the EIC Accelerator stage. In the past, we haven’t seen many projects progress through this pathway, which is understandable since the accelerator only began as a pilot programme around 2020/21. However, we want to see more projects transition through the system, and efforts are underway to explore new strategies to streamline this process, fostering collaboration within a portfolio context to enhance resource development and the acceptance of these innovations.
How do you incorporate learning from previous Pathfinder challenges? How much crossover is there between your two challenges?
O. We have both inherited Pathfinder challenge portfolios that kicked off in previous years, through which we gained practical insights into how to ensure projects collaborate effectively, how much supervision is required, and how to set the right expectations during our initial calls.
F. Today, projects have a much clearer understanding of their roles within the portfolio. We have learned valuable lessons over time about managing portfolios and the strategic plans that accompany them.
Both of us wanted to approach health as a unified field, with each of us covering our respective areas of expertise, while also recognising that many projects may integrate biotech and medtech approaches. For instance, an innovation may be deeply rooted in biotechnology, but ultimately, it aims to develop a medical device.
In our collaboration, we are actively seeking to identify topics and stakeholders where both our fields are relevant. Over the past year, we have engaged in activities in nanomedicine and women’s health, as well as in advanced materials. We jointly work on collaborations, for example, with EMA and other organisations like EuroBioImaging.
O. When you’re a patient, you don’t differentiate between innovations in biotech or med tech. These solutions must be integrated with one another. This perspective has greatly influenced our collaboration as we strive to learn from each other’s fields and the work we are doing individually, as well as identify areas where our technologies intersect. In those instances, our collaboration becomes very hands-on. We communicate frequently, and this ongoing dialogue is crucial for maximising the impact of our innovators and ultimately benefiting patients across Europe.
In your opinion, what might be the next EIC focus within health and biotechnology? Can you share any insights on emerging trends or upcoming projects?
F. It’s generally too early to make definitive predictions, as EIC’s strategic intelligence typically begins in January to determine what may be the next steps. However, we are increasingly observing a rise in deep technologies within the healthcare sector that combine hardware, software, and intelligence, including AI and ambient data from the environment, such as the room or home you are in.
This shift is aimed at moving from episodic healthcare (where treatment is provided only when a specific health issue arises) to a model that emphasises preventive care and, even more importantly, continuous and connected health management.
For instance, a foundational AI model of the human body, presented at the MICAAI conference, utilises various sensors, such as smartwatches or smart patches, to collect and integrate information, ultimately creating a digital twin that incorporates real-time data.
O. We are still at a stage where we are exploring technology from various perspectives and assessing current trends. Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly pervasive. This will be an interesting area to monitor, ensuring we do not duplicate efforts already underway elsewhere.
Conclusion
The EIC Pathfinder programme is a crucial tool for advancing innovative health technologies that can significantly improve patient care and clinical decision-making. The emphasis on transformative, high-risk projects allows for groundbreaking advancements that may redefine the future of healthcare. If you’re interested in learning more, visit the EIC Pathfinder website or discover more about the projects mentioned in this article: Generative AI-Based Agents to Revolutionise Medical Diagnosis and Treatment of Cancer, and Biotechnology for Healthy Ageing.
Please note, this article will also appear in the 25th edition of our quarterly publication.
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