A landmark moment for European ME research: the European ME Research Group, formed in 2015, has secured the first major EU Horizon award dedicated to myalgic encephalomyelitis - bringing together over 20 research institutions across more than a dozen countries in a four-year, coordinated, multi-national biomedical research programme.
The European ME Research Group (EMERG) announces that the DISCOVER-ME consortium - led by EMERG and coordinated by the Medical University of Vienna, with the Quadram Institute Bioscience (Norwich Research Park, UK) as a leading partner - has been awarded EU Horizon funding under call HORIZON-HLTH-2025-01-DISEASE-07: Tackling high-burden for patients and under-researched medical conditions. This is the first European research call ever to name ME explicitly as a priority condition, and DISCOVER-ME is the first major pan-European biomedical research programme dedicated to the disease.
For a disease that has long been under-resourced relative to its burden on patients and society, this award represents a significant turning point for European ME research. It is the product of more than a decade of collaborative network-building by EMERG researchers and clinicians, facilitated through the annual IiMER International ME Conference Week and Biomedical Research Colloquia, which have served as the principal forum for European ME research exchange since EMERG's formation in 2015.
About this page
This page announces the award of EU Horizon funding to the EMERG-led DISCOVER-ME consortium - the first major pan-European biomedical research programme dedicated to ME. It describes the project scope, the consortium, and what this award means for ME research. - June 2026
EMERG and the Road to DISCOVER-ME
EMERG was founded in 2015 by UK charity Invest in ME Research with the aim of bringing together leading researchers and clinicians working on ME across Europe under a shared collaborative framework. From the outset, the group met annually alongside the IiMER International ME Conference Week and Biomedical Research Colloquia - events that have provided the principal international forum for biomedical ME research exchange for twenty years.
It was through successive EMERG working sessions at those colloquia that the researchers who now form the base for the DISCOVER-ME consortium developed the collaborative relationships and shared scientific objectives that a project of this scale requires. When the EU Horizon call was published - the first ever to name ME as a priority condition - EMERG was positioned to respond.
The development of the consortium proposal was supported by a specialist consultancy, jointly funded by Invest in ME Research and Luna Nova. That investment proved decisive in developing and submitting a proposal to the standard required for a successful EU Horizon award.
The Project: DISCOVER-ME
Biological evidence and mechanism-based disease classification for the improved diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of ME/CFS
DISCOVER-ME is a four-year, multi-national research programme submitted under
EU Horizon call HORIZON-HLTH-2025-01-DISEASE-07. The project brings
together over 20 partner institutions across more than a dozen countries in
Europe and Canada, working across nine coordinated work packages spanning
basic science, clinical research, computational biology, patient and public
involvement, and dissemination.
The scientific programme addresses the core pathophysiological mechanisms of ME/CFS - immune dysregulation, neurological involvement, autonomic dysfunction, and metabolic abnormalities - through a coordinated translational research approach designed to identify reproducible biomarkers and inform future treatment development.
The project will undertake harmonised clinical phenotyping of 2,000 patients and multi-omics profiling of over 900 samples drawn from five European biobanks, generating the largest coordinated dataset ever assembled for ME research. A systems-level disease taxonomy grounded in mechanistic disease drivers, supported by AI-assisted stratification, will underpin biomarker-guided clinical trials and precision drug repurposing approaches. Open-access disease maps and digital twin models will be developed and made freely available to the wider research community.
Harmonised assessment of 2,000 patients across multiple European sites
900+ biobank samples profiled across five European biobanks
Validation and prioritisation across genetic, immune, metabolic and vascular domains
AI-assisted systems-level taxonomy and digital twin models for therapeutic testing
Patient and Public Involvement
Patient and public involvement is embedded throughout DISCOVER-ME. The European ME Alliance (EMEA) leads PPI across all nine work packages through the EMEA PPI Group, ensuring that research priorities and outputs remain connected to the lived experience of people with ME and that findings reach the patient community effectively.
EMEA's involvement in DISCOVER-ME reflects the broader European infrastructure spanning patient advocacy, clinical networks, and research collaboration that has been built over twenty years through the work of Invest in ME Research - who also proposed EMEA as the PPI body for DISCOVER-ME, integrating patient representation at governance level across all nine work packages.
What This Award Means for Research into ME
Myalgic encephalomyelitis affects up to 1% of the population. Despite its prevalence and severity - with a socioeconomic burden exceeding €40 billion annually in Europe - it has until now attracted research investment at a fraction of the level justified by that burden. Decades of fragmented, underpowered studies have stalled progress on understanding the disease mechanisms that must be identified before effective diagnostics and treatments can be developed.
DISCOVER-ME addresses that directly. For the first time, a coordinated, multi-site, multi-omics programme will generate the scale of evidence needed to establish a biologically grounded disease taxonomy and a validated biomarker framework for ME. The project formally begins in July 2026 and will run for four years.
Progress and findings will be communicated through open-access publication, through the DISCOVER-ME project website, and through the EMERG annual meeting and associated scientific events.
Last Update June 2026