Funding Opportunities

Lauren S. Aaronson Frontiers Pilot Program

The Lauren S. Aaronson (LSA) Frontiers Clinical and Translational Research Pilot Program provides grant funding and other support to grow interdisciplinary, investigator-initiated clinical and translational research across a broad range of scientific disciplines. The objective of this pilot program is to support new and innovative ideas that will lead to externally funded awards.

Up to three awards are issued annually for up to $50,000 each. 

LSA Research Priority Areas

Pilot projects are encouraged to focus on translational science, i.e., understanding a scientific or operational principle underlying a step of the translational process with the goal of developing generalizable principles to accelerate translational research.

NCATS definitions:

• Translation: The process of turning observations in the laboratory, clinic and community into interventions that improve the health of individuals and communities – from diagnostics, preventions, and treatments to medical procedures and behavioral changes.
• Translational Research: The endeavor to traverse a particular step of the translational process for a particular target or disease.
• Translational Science: The field of investigation focused on understanding the scientific and operational principles underlying each step of the translational process.

Where translational research focuses on advancing a step of the translational process for a specific target/disease, translational science seeks to develop, demonstrate, and disseminate generalizable innovations and strategies to improve the process of translational research.

Translational science projects seek to 1) identify and understand barriers that delay progress or limit the quality, impact, or equity of translational research (e.g., clinical trial recruitment, data interoperability, implementation, etc.), and 2) develop innovative solutions (e.g., methods, best practices, tools, technologies) to overcome these barriers. Addressing critical barriers will allow subsequent translational research to accelerate the time from discovery to improved human health. The innovative solutions will have broad applicability to multiple research projects, increasing capacity and efficiency.

Applications directly related to one or more of the following areas will be accepted:

• Processes and programs to understand, support and advance translation, e.g., collaborative structures; diverse workforce development; integration of project management; incentives/credit for team science; incentives/credit for health improvements; education/training (scientific and cultural); biomarker qualification process.
• Data-related improvements and tools, e.g., data interoperability; Electronic Health Records for research; data transparency/release.
• Clinical research improvements and tools, e.g., clinical trial networks; clinical outcome criteria
• (e.g., patient-reported outcomes); clinical diagnostic criteria; contemporary clinical trial designs; single Institutional Review Board (IRB) implementation; regulatory science; shortening time of intervention adoption.
• Clinical study recruitment improvements and tools, e.g., identification, recruitment, engagement and/or retention of populations and/or subpopulations in clinical trials and studies.
• Community and stakeholder engagement.
• Methods to better measure impact on health (or lack thereof).

Application Materials

The deadline for letters of intent has passed for 2024. The 2025 RFA will be released in November, 2024. 

Previous Application Materials

Budget Form and Justification

Institutional Letter of Support Template

Letter of Intent Project Overview

Required PHS Form

Full Application Research Form

Integrating Special Populations Pilot Award

Integrating Special Populations (ISP) Pilot Program provides grant funding and other support for clinical and translational research across a broad range of scientific disciplines. The objective of this pilot program is to support new and innovative ideas that will lead to externally funded awards. The Frontiers ISP Pilot Award addresses this goal by providing funds to help investigators carry out early-stage research addressing our primary aims 1. Improve health outcomes across the lifespan through multidisciplinary, multi-organizational teams that include patients, caregivers, clinicians, scientists, and other stakeholders and 2. Improve rare disease health outcomes by leveraging input from all stakeholders in study design.

One award is given annually for $25,000.

ISP Research Focus Areas

• Consequences of Maternal-Fetal-Child, and Adolescent disorders and socio-economic disparities on the health of adults and older adults.
• Supporting Transitions of Care from childhood to young adult and adult to older adult.
• Incorporating participants who are older adults or rural residents in drug and other intervention development and testing.
• Addressing unique challenges of rare diseases and improving access to care and other resources for families in rural and underserved communities.

Application Materials

The deadline for letters of intent has passed for 2024. The 2025 RFA will be released in January, 2025. 

ISP Research Plan Template

The Broderick Crawford Community-Research Partnership Awards

Frontiers and the Frontiers Community and Collaboration Core are pleased to announce the availability of theBroderick Crawford Community Research Partnership Awards to support the Development of new academic-community partnerships or to strengthen existing partnerships. These awards will be used to facilitate community-based activities that build trust and strengthen relationships between researchers, patient advocates, community members and/or community-based organizations.

Up to six awards issued annually; each award is up to $2,500. 

About Broderick A. Crawford:

Broderick Crawford was the President and Executive Director of the NBC Community Development Corporation. With over 30 years of experience in health care and community advocacy, Broderick was a national leader for community voice in research. He served on the Recruitment Innovation Center Community Advisory Board and was a Co-Principal Investigator on a large National Institutes of Health funded RADx-UP grant project in 10 Kansas counties. Many of us were fortunate enough to call him a friend and colleague and he more than deserves this award to be named in his honor.

Application Materials 

The Broderick Crawford Community Research Partnership Funding Mechanism is currently Closed. The deadline for letters of intent has passed for 2024. The 2025 RFA will be released in Fall 2024. 

Inter-Institutional Pilot Project Awards

The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences’ (NCATS) Clinical & Translational Science Award (CTSA) program seeks to develop and implement innovative solutions that will improve the efficiency, quality, and impact of the process for turning observations in the laboratory, clinic, and community into interventions that improve the health of individuals and communities.

The CTSA program supports a national network of medical research institutions that work together to speed the translation of research discovery into improved patient care. Eight CTSA institutions have joined together to form the Consortium of Rural States (CORES): The University of Utah Health, the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, Frontiers Clinical and Translational Science Institute, the University of Kentucky, the Translational Research Institute at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, the University of Iowa, Dartmouth University, and Penn State University.

The purpose of this request for applications (RFA) is to promote multi-institutional collaboration across the CTSA consortium by funding innovative translational science research projects that involve two or more of these seven CTSA institutions. This pilot program is soliciting applications from faculty members at all career levels for translational science pilot projects that will exemplify the CTSA mission of “understanding a scientific or operational principle underlying a step of the translational process with the goal of developing generalizable principles to accelerate translational research.”

CORES Pilot Focus Areas

The CORES Inter‐Institutional Pilot Program will fund translational science projects aiming to identify and overcome barriers to the performance of translational research.

Pilots should articulate a clear translational research barrier(s) and propose an innovative plan to overcome or ameliorate the barrier (i.e., a translational science innovation). The proposed innovations should be broadly generalizable to many different translational research questions, and not specific to any one project or disease. Proposed projects should align with one of the following project scopes:

In accordance with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) strategic plan and its commitment to increasing representation in research, funding emphasis for this RFA will be given to translational science proposals that address one of the following:

• Climate Change and Environmental Health
• Rural Health
• Maternal Health
• Health Equity for Underrepresented Populations
  • For example, pediatric populations, older adults, people with disabilities and/or rare disorders, underrepresented racial/ethnic and/or sexual and gender minorities, rural populations or populations with low socio-economic status. Click here for more details.

Application Materials

The next iteration of the CORES Inter-institutional Pilot Award will be announced in Fall 2024. 

Previous Application Materials

Click here for the Request for Applications.

Institute for Advancing Medical Innovation Trailblazer Awards

The Institute for Advancing Medical Innovation (IAMI) Trailblazer Award provides grant funding and other support for clinical and translational research across a broad range of scientific disciplines. The objective of this pilot program is to support new and innovative ideas that will lead to externally funded awards. The Frontiers IAMI Trailblazer Award addresses this goal by providing funds to help investigators carry out early-stage project development of novel drugs, devices, and diagnostics. The overall intent is to acquire research results that are disseminated in impactful publications, support successful extramural funding applications, and yield products to be entered into our product development pipeline.

Up to two awards are given annually for up to $25,000 each. 

IAMI Research Focus Areas

Experimental Therapeutics Trials

Eligible research activities include a) clinical validation of a drug target; b) clinical pharmacology (e.g., drug metabolism, bioanalysis, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, pharmacogenomics, allometric scaling); c) clinical proof of concept of a novel therapeutic or a repurposed FDA-approved or abandoned drug. Eligible awardees must have demonstrated proof of principle in validated in vitro and/or in vivo preclinical models.

Drug and Medical Device Development

Eligible research activity includes high throughput screening; generation and optimization of small molecule lead candidates; discovery of macromolecule therapeutics; synthesis of sufficient quantities of active pharmaceutical ingredient required for animal testing; conduct of preclinical safety, pharmacokinetic and proof of principle studies in validated animal models of disease; formulation development (including analytical chemistry support); as well as creation of prototype medical devices as well as necessary device testing.

Biomarker Discovery and Validation

Eligible research activities include a) biospecimen collection; b) patient registry development; c) genetic, genomic, proteomic and metabolomic analysis of patient specimens, and d) analysis of patient specimens using established and investigational methods to discover and validate biomarkers of drug activity.

Entrepreneurship Activities Consistent with IAMI’s Mission

Eligible research activities defining the investment thesis for potential product development opportunities, including unmet medical need, proposed solution, market, competitive landscape, patent position and strategy, summary of existing data, product development and regulatory planning, marketing and licensing strategy, as well as support for obtaining key opinion leader input.

While not required, special consideration will be given to applications which address the CTSA priority of research into the needs of the rare disease community.

Application Materials

The deadline for letters of intent has passed for 2024. The 2025 RFA will be released in December, 2024. 

Previous Application Materials 

Research Plan Template

Request for Applications

Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design Trailblazer Award

The Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design (BERD) Trailblazer Award provides grant funding to support statistical, epidemiological, and data science investigations toward novel methods development that will improve clinical and translational research (CTR) inferences. BERD Trailblazer Awards support research projects for methods development for CTR. 

One award is given annually for up to $20,000. 

BERD Research Focus Areas

Frontiers BERD Trailblazer Awards support projects that address methodologies or analyses useful to the study of all diseases, and include academic disciplines such as biostatistics, epidemiology, bioinformatics, data science, and other quantitative areas that impact clinical and translational science.

Application Materials

The deadline for letters of intent has passed for 2024. The 2025 RFA will be released in December 2024. 

Previous Application Materials

Request for Applications

Research Plan Template

External Funding Opportunities

TOPMed Fellowship – Funding Opportunity Description

Over the last several decades, NHLBI has invested in creating a significant resource for research and development by supporting the creation of many observational, epidemiological, and longitudinal datasets related to heart, lung, blood and sleep phenotypes, with the aim of uncovering insights that may be leveraged toward novel therapeutic, interventional, or preventive strategies resulting in improved patient outcomes. In the past 10 years, the TOPMed program has generated a collection of genomic, epigenomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic data (see details at https://topmed.nhlbi.nih.gov/) from over 200,000 well-phenotyped individuals to enable detailed characterization of these study participants. This data is available for access by researchers in the BioDataCatalyst and dbGaP databases. Together, this multi-omics data coupled with clinical, imaging, EHR, and environmental data, present both unprecedented opportunities for data-driven discovery as well as challenges. Analyzing and combining these datasets are currently limited by both practical and conceptual constraints. With this fellowship program, TOPMed seeks to enable and accelerate AI/ML-driven mining of these rich datasets from diverse populations.

The goal of the TOPMed Fellowship program is to promote broad participation and engagement of early-career researchers in applying novel and innovative AI/ML approaches on data-focused research problems. The program will provide support for researchers who will leverage the trans-omics resources of TOPMed and beyond to gain access to training, data, and analytical tools needed to rapidly develop research skills required in the AI/ML field. It will also cultivate a community of computer scientists and data scientists with broad understanding of AI/ML to help drive scientific discovery in biomedical research and precision medicine through the informed use of AI/ML. The fellowship opportunities are aimed to facilitate the career advancement and/or transition of scientists to the next steps in their scientific careers and to develop a cadre of diverse scientists capable of applying AI/ML approaches to address challenging research questions in areas of HLBS, including Women’s Health Research and bias in AI/ML algorithms or data.

The NHLBI recognizes a unique and compelling need for its precision medicine program to promote inclusive excellence in genomics and its data sciences research workforce. Individuals from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups as well as individuals with disabilities are always encouraged to apply for NIH support (see NOT-OD-20-031).

Applicants need to focus on the area within the NHLBI’s mission and propose to use existing or up- coming data to conduct discovery research. In addition, applicants are encouraged either to use an AI/ML method as one of their main analytic tools in their research plan or have an AI/ML training plan outside the main research plan. TOPMed fellows are encouraged to use TOPMed data as either the primary or secondary dataset in their proposals. Examples of relevant topic areas and research approaches include but are not limited to:

• AI/ML models to analyze multi-omics data along with other phenotypic and clinical data;
• Novel approaches to better understand and predict women's health issues with special focus on lifespan events such as pregnancy and menopause;
• Evaluate advance and limitations of AI/ML methods in applications for HLBS research;
• Leveraging genomics and longitudinal clinical data to understand susceptibility, differential risk, and need for intensive intervention of HLBS disease.

To apply, visit the TOPMed website at https://topmed.nhlbi.nih.gov/2024-topmed-fellowship to create an applicant account.

KEY DATES

• Solicitation Open Date: August 9, 2024
• Informational Webinar Session: September 5, 2024, at 3:00pm ET.
• Frequently Asked Questions Posted:  September 10, 2024
• Proposal Due Date: October 29, 2024, 5:00PM EDT
• Scientific Review Meeting: Week of December 2, 2024
• Award Notification: February 15, 2025

For questions, please contact the TOPMed Administrative Coordinating Center at topmed-admin@westat.com.