Source: NIH Office of Extramural Research
Ravi Basavappa, Ph.D.
Office of Strategic Coordination
Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives
Office of the Director, NIH
1 Center Drive, MSC 0189
Building 1, Room 205
Bethesda, MD 20892-0189
Telephone: 301-435-7204
Email: Transformative_Awards@mail.nih.gov
The NIH Director’s Transformative Research Awards complements NIH’s traditional, investigator-initiated grant programs by supporting individual scientists or groups of scientists proposing groundbreaking, exceptionally innovative, original and/or unconventional research with the potential to create new scientific paradigms. Little or no preliminary data are expected. Projects must clearly demonstrate potential to produce a major impact in a broad area of biomedical or behavioral research.
The Common Fund's NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award initiative, formerly known as the Transformative Research Project (TR01), is created specifically to support exceptionally innovative and/or unconventional research projects that have the potential to create or overturn fundamental paradigms. These projects tend to be inherently risky and may not fare well in conventional NIH review. As compared to the other NIH Director’s Awards - the Pioneer, New Innovator Award, and Early Independence Awards - the primary emphasis of the Transformative Research Awards initiative is to support research on bold, paradigm-shifting, but untested ideas, rather than to support exceptionally creative individuals who wish to pursue new, potentially high impact research directions.
To facilitate submission and identification of bold, high impact ideas that are compelling despite the risks involved, the Transformative Research Awards initiative is also piloting novel approaches to application instructions and review. Applicants are instructed to focus their research strategies on significance and innovation without expectations of providing preliminary data. The review uses a multi-phase, Editorial Board style process with explicit emphasis maintained on significance and innovation.
The NIH encourages Transformative Research Award applications from investigators in all disciplines relevant to the NIH mission, including the biological, behavioral, clinical, social, physical, chemical, computational, engineering, and mathematical sciences. Applications from individual investigators or teams of investigators are welcome. Budgets may be up to $25 million total costs per year for up to five years.
Source: NCI Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis
The NCI Clinical Assay Development Program (CADP) is requesting project applications from investigators seeking clinical assay validation resources. These resources are designed to assist with the development of assays that may predict therapy response or prognostic behavior of a diagnosed cancer, primarily for use in clinical trials. Approved projects for the NCI CADP will be provided access to the Institutes assay development and validation resources, including project management support.
When applying to the CADP, it is important that the investigators define the intended clinical use for the assay for which support is requested. Assays submitted for CADP development services should have been tested on human tissue. As part of the application, investigators are required to provide basic assay protocol(s). Proposals will be reviewed for scientific merit, feasibility and clinical importance.
For more information please visit: http://cadp.cancer.gov/
Source: NIH Office of Extramural Research
The National Cancer Institute announces two new Funding Opportunity Announcements to support research projects designed to use sound and innovative research strategies to solve specific problems and paradoxes in cancer research identified by the NCI's “Provocative Questions” (PQs). These PQs are not intended to represent the full range of NCI's priorities in cancer research. Rather, they are meant to challenge cancer researchers to think about and elucidate specific problems in key areas of cancer research that are deemed important but have not received sufficient attention.
Information related to all of the PQs and the funding announcements can be found at http://provocativequestions.nci.nih.gov/.
Source: Federal Business Opportunities
The Center for Strategic Scientific Initiatives of the National Cancer Institute announces a new Request-for-Proposals (RFP) for a data center and data portal to support the network of Proteome Characterization Centers (PCCs) in the CPTC initiative. During the performance of this project, 4 to 6 tumor types will be characterized by the PCCs using a variety of platforms and experimental approaches to molecularly characterize cancer cells.
The key dates related to this funding opportunity are:
Source: NIH Office of Extramural Research
Source: NIH Office of Extramural Research
The Center for Strategic Scientific Initiatives of the National Cancer Institute announces a new Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for a network of Proteome Characterization Centers (PCCs) in the Clinical Proteomic Technologies for Cancer initiative (CPTC; http://proteomics.cancer.gov). This FOA seeks to build upon the CPTC initiative by soliciting grant applications to build a multidisciplinary collaborative team of Proteome Characterization Centers (PCCs). The PCCs are expected to foster multi-institutional and transdisciplinary interactions using data and selected biospecimens from cancer genomics programs (e.g., The Cancer Genome Atlas [TCGA; http://cancergenome.nih.gov] and others) to systematically define the functional cancer proteome that derives from alterations in cancer genomes, discover and verify protein (and peptide) biomarkers, and in doing so, drive the development of proteomic technologies.
Key Dates: