Trust in science and technology and the acceptability and adoption of innovative outcomes is crucially dependent on the ethical qualities of the research. The EU-funded project CHANGER aims to promote changes in research ethics reviews, to strengthen the capacities of researchers to incorporate ethical judgements in the project design and implementation, as well as to support Research Ethics Committees in addressing new challenges posed by new developments in research. This paper will address two crucial questions motivating CHANGER: First, why do we need to update research ethics reviews, and second, what tentative tools can support such processes? As to the “Why” question, current research practices have moved to new forms of ethical challenges. For instance, biomedical research operates with pluripotent stem cells stored in commercial biobanks which can be used to produce human organoids. What kind of consent can cover these aspects? Big Data challenge our usual assumptions when they involve data produced by individuals in some other, not-research related context. Ethical challenges are raised by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies (bias, privacy, impact on human rights and values, etc.) and will continue to evolve as technology advances (i.e., Generative AI raises the issue of identifying human action in the production of texts, images etc). Transformative research often takes the form of transdisciplinary research where ethical issues cannot be identified from the outset but emerge during the process. CHANGER argues that a new paradigm for ethics reviews is required to meet these and the constantly evolving ethical challenges. As to the “What” question CHANGER will explore the notion of moving from an ex-ante review model to a process-oriented model of learning by doing and ethics in dialogue, adaptive across all research phases, utilising various tools: narrative based scenarios in projects to help anticipate challenges in research; iterated ethics assessments, and differentiation into primary and secondary uses of personal data; and institutional capacity building in project preparations to account for ethics-by-design and upstream assessments. Finally, CHANGER will explore policies for the adoption of novel ethics review approaches and facilitate sustainable human rights-embedded ethics in the European Research Area to foster trust.