Category: Funding Opportunities

We’re once again soliciting applications for exceptionally innovative research projects whose outcome, if successful, could have a major impact on a broad swath of the scientific community. NIGMS is the lead institute for the EUREKA initiative, and eight other NIH institutes are also participating this year.

If you’ve got an idea that could change the world, and your research interests mesh with those of any of the participating institutes, you should consider applying for a EUREKA grant. In general, we’re looking for projects that can be started and completed during the term of the award. The exceptionally innovative component can be the hypothesis that you’re testing—a novel, unconventional idea that challenges prevailing wisdom—or a clever solution to a technological or conceptual problem that’s impeding progress in your field.

Interested? Check out the funding opportunity announcement in the NIH Guide. You can apply for up to $250,000 (direct costs) per year for a maximum of four years. NIGMS has set aside $6 million for EUREKA awards in fiscal year 2010.

When you look at the application instructions, you’ll see that EUREKA applications are very different from conventional R01s. In your biosketch, you’ll be citing up to 10 publications, patents and meeting abstracts that demonstrate your ability to use innovative approaches to challenge conventional wisdom or solve difficult problems, rather than simply listing your most recent publications. In the research plan, which is only seven pages long, you’ll be answering questions that are designed to focus your attention on the importance of the problem, the novelty of your hypothesis or approach and the magnitude of the potential impact, rather than on experimental details. It’s not as formidable as it sounds. Many of the investigators who applied for EUREKAs in past years have told me that they enjoyed writing their applications—not a comment that we hear very often from the scientific community!

The receipt deadline for EUREKA applications is November 24, 2009. This is a special receipt date, so you won’t be able to get an extension for personal reasons or study section service. We’ll be reviewing applications in March or April 2010, and plan to make awards (around 20) in the summer of 2010.

For more information about EUREKA, check out our Frequently Asked Questions (Link no longer active).

The trans-NIH Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative (BISTI) funds a range of projects that advance computer science and technology to address problems in biology and medicine. BISTI, which is led by NIGMS, has just reissued four broad-based program announcements to support “innovations in biomedical computing.” In the past, BISTI has awarded 198 of these grants ranging from $200,000 to $3 million.

The announcements cover traditional research projects; exploratory, high-risk/high-impact projects; small business innovation research; and small business technology transfer grants. They apply to most areas of NIH research, from basic to clinical, and require that more than 50 percent of the proposed research involve computing. For example, investigators can request funds for scientists and software personnel to develop models to analyze a disease, and they can also request funds to obtain data or perform experiments to validate the models. Again, in all cases the majority of effort should be on the computing side.

If you want to significantly expand your computing efforts and capabilities, these funding announcements are a really great opportunity!

Whether you’re interested in a single protein or many, you now have the chance to join the Protein Structure Initiative’s PSI:Biology network, which will apply high-throughput structural approaches to solve interesting biological problems.

We have just released three funding opportunities that will establish the core of the PSI:Biology research network:

Centers for High-Throughput Structure Determination – large-scale centers that will have the capacity to solve structures on the order of several hundred per year.

Centers for Membrane Protein Structure Determination – small centers that will devote special effort to solving the structures of these proteins.

Consortia for High-Throughput Enabled Structural Biology Partnerships – these awards will support functional studies of proteins proposed by individuals or groups of researchers from across all fields of biology as well as support the structural determination of those proteins through consortia with the PSI:Biology structure centers. Ideal projects will integrate functional and structural data for a large number of protein structures to solve significant biological problems.

In addition to these opportunities, we plan to issue program announcements for experimental technology development, computational and molecular modeling and more ways for partners to bring their interests to the target-setting table. We’ll announce these in the NIH Guide and here in the Feedback Loop.

If you have just one or two proteins that need to be solved, you can nominate them as targets for structure determination via the PSI Structural Genomics Knowledgebase, which offers a cool widget so you can easily access the site from your Web page.

UPDATE: The due dates for letters of intent and applications have been extended to September 28, 2009, and October 28, 2009, respectively. For more details, see NOT-GM-09-026.

NIH has announced two new, technology-oriented Recovery Act funding opportunities targeted to businesses:

• The Small Business Catalyst Awards for Accelerating Innovative Research (R43) will speed innovation by supporting early-stage ideas with commercial potential that promise to greatly advance a technological area within the NIH mission—not merely lead to incremental improvements of existing technologies. NIH plans to award 20 to 25 one-year grants, each up to $200,000 in total costs. Applications from small businesses with no prior NIH Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) or Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) support may receive funding priority.

• Biomedical Research, Development, and Growth to Spur the Acceleration of New Technologies (BRDG-SPAN) Pilot Program (RC3) will help bridge the gap between the research and development of promising technologies and the commercialization of these technologies. NIH plans to make at least 10 awards, each up to $1 million in total costs per year for up to three years.

If you’re interested in applying for either opportunity, send your letters of intent by August 3, 2009. Please feel free to contact me offline with specific questions.