The Gates Vaccine Innovation Award

The Gates Foundation invites you to nominate individuals or a group of individuals who have achieved significant improvements in the prevention, control, or elimination of vaccine-preventable diseases through immunization.  Nominees will be assessed on three broad criteria:

• Impact – The nominee should have achieved significant improvements in the prevention, control, or elimination of vaccine-preventable disease.
• Innovation and creativity – The nominee should have applied imaginative and pioneering approaches to overcome difficult challenges to immunizing children and achieving impact.
• Scale – The nominee’s innovation should be at scale or suitable to be implemented at scale within the nominee’s country and around the world.

For more information, please see: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/vaccines/Pages/vaccine-innovation-award.aspx

This award is focused ONLY on programs and policies associated with achieving impact through the delivery of vaccines.

The award winner will be recognized with $250,000 (U.S.) and personally acknowledged by Gates Foundation leadership.

Nominations will be accepted through 11:30 AM Pacific Standard Time on November 17, 2011.

Limited Competition: Framework Programs for Global Health Innovation (D43)

This grant aims to provide support for the development of broadly interdisciplinary training programs in global health directed towards encouraging innovation in products, processes, and policies.  Trainees should be at the postdoctoral level or have attained a terminal degree in their fields.  Training projects should identify critical health needs in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) that can be addressed through Innovation, and carry out the scientific research necessary to develop, validate, and test their concepts. To increase the translation of research findings into realized health benefits, project design should include considerations of implementation appropriate to low resource settings in LMICs, particularly regarding increased effectiveness, affordability, accessibility, ease of use or delivery, and/or scalability.


The 3 goals of this grant are: 


1.  To expand the base of expertise needed and available to tackle the challenging problems of global health by developing trans-institutional, problem-solving based research training programs that will bring together trainees of widely diverse expertise to work together on research problems in Global Health.


2. To stimulate new knowledge, approaches, and solutions in global health.


3. To integrate global health research communities within and among institutions by building capacity at the institution(s) to support an interdisciplinary research training program in Global Health Innovation.


The application must include participation by at least three Schools, departments, or entities of distinct disciplines, either at the applicant institution or among a consortium.  Subspecialties within a field, such as Medicine, would not qualify as distinct disciplines, and three departments within one School are unlikely to meet this standard.


This grant is worth $350,000 in total costs per year over 5 years.  The deadline is 15 December 2011.


For more details, see:
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PAR-12-003.html

Request for Proposals: Targeted Biomedical Research Exploring the mechanisms for HIV persistence and the potential for HIV eradication

amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, is pleased to announce the availability of targeted support for biomedical research projects relevant to exploring the mechanisms for HIV persistence and the potential for HIV eradication in the following areas of research:

• Novel strategies/approaches for preventing the establishment of, or eliminating, viral reservoirs
• Understanding and characterizing cellular and tissue locations of reservoirs and their relative importance in maintaining infection in the face of ART and the immune system
• Understanding the extent to which persistence is due to true latency versus low level replication. How does the effect of ART differ in each case?
• Is there a threshold viral load below which infection will not be re-seeded?
• Studies in elite controllers and/or acute (i.e. the absence of antibody positivity) infection cohorts that may help define new mechanisms of persistence that are not HLA-driven.
• Does persistent immune activation point to a need for long-term immune reconstitution strategies? Are there benefits to immune therapy?
• Improved assays to quantify integrated versus unintegrated DNA, or characterize replication competence. Do these differ between tissues, in patients treated during acute versus chronic infection, or in progressors versus controllers?
• Improved assays to more efficiently and inexpensively measure extremely low viral load (e.g., to 0.01 copies/ml) or (changes in) the size of the persistent reservoir.
• Deep sequencing approaches to compare viruses in different tissue compartments with those in plasma following treatment interruption, with a view to identifying sources of viral rebound
• What are the consequences of chronic immune activation, in the presence or absence of ART, on tissues such as the gut, and can the damage be reversed if immune activation is controlled?

Act fast!  The deadline is 25 October 2011.  The grant is worth 250,000 USD over two years

See the link for more information.

http://www.amfar.org/lab/grants/default.aspx?id=10364#Submission_Requirements_and_Deadlines

NIH/PEPFAR Collaboration for Advancing Implementation Science in Prevention of Maternal-Child HIV Transmission (PMTCT) (R01)

The NIH, in collaboration with the Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator, invites applications for implementation science projects that will inform the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) as they develop more efficient and cost-effective methods to deliver proven interventions for prevention of maternal-child HIV transmission (PMTCT) in PEPFAR priority countries.  In Southeast Asia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia are PEPFAR priority countries.


Globally, over 1,000 children are newly infected with HIV each day, the majority in sub-Saharan Africa; the primary mode of HIV acquisition for infants is through mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding.


Research topics may include:
      1.) Optimal ways to enhance identification of HIV-infected pregnant women
      2.) Community-based strategies effectively increase preventative MTCT (PMTCT) uptake and reduce stigma, 
      3.) Does family and male partner involvement to increase PMTCT uptake and successful completion of the cascade and how can family and male partner involvement in PMTCT be increased? 
      4.) In a variety of settings (urban, rural), what are barriers to and effective strategies for providing more complex antiretroviral prophylaxis regimens to HIV-infected women who do not qualify for ART at the present time?
      5.) What strategies are needed to optimize nutrition for the HIV-exposed infants and for their HIV-infected breastfeeding mothers?


There are many other examples of research topics.  Please visit http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-HD-12-210.html for more information.


The deadline is 28 February 2012, but a letter of intent is due by 28 January 2012.  This grant is worth 1,000,000 USD over two years.

Gates Foundation: Grand Challenges Exploration Round #8

The Gates Foundation released the topics for its newest call for applications:
http://www.grandchallenges.org/Explorations/Pages/TopicsOverview.aspx
There are 5 topics, although 2 are particularly interesting for TropMed:


1.)Design New Approaches to Optimize Immunization Systems
This topic aims to generate novel approaches to optimizing the performance of immunization logistics and supply systems in low-resource settings. Applicants are encouraged to re-examine the systems trusted with delivering vaccines and design innovative solutions to optimize the performance of these systems, both today and in the future. We seek proposals that are responsive to the topic that are daring in premise and clearly different from the approaches currently under investigation or employed. The solutions submitted to this topic must be focused on the operational aspects of immunization systems in countries, and must have the potential to be scaled up or reproduced in multiple settings.
http://www.grandchallenges.org/ImproveVaccines/Topics/Pages/OptimizeImmunizationSystemsRound8.aspx


2.) Explore Nutrition for Healthy Growth of Infants and Children
The goal of this topic is to solicit new scientific understanding and new science-based preventative and therapeutic approaches to improve nutrition and promote the healthy growth and development of infants and young children. We strongly encourage investigating the mechanisms of action of nutritional deficiencies and interventions, since this will provide the basis for new strategies to promote healthy growth and will facilitate developing tests to measure nutritional status and to measure treatment outcomes, including discriminating responders from non-responders in population studies.
http://www.grandchallenges.org/ImproveNutrition/Topics/Pages/NutritionforInfantsandChildrenRound8.aspx

The deadline for all responses to the Grand Challenges Exploration Round #8 are 17 November 2011.

NIH Research Project Grant (Parent R01)

The Research Project Grant (R01) is an award made to an institution/organization to support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in areas representing the specific interests and competencies of the investigator(s). The R01 research plan proposed by the applicant institution/organization must be related to the stated program interests of one or more of the NIH Institutes and Centers (ICs) based on descriptions of their programs (contact the Faculty of Tropical Medicine Office of Research Services for assistance identifying which IC to apply to).


For more information, see:
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PA-11-260.html


The funding is for 3-5 years and the budget depends on the scope of the project.


The next deadline is 5 October 2011.  There are regular deadlines every February, October, and June

NIH Research to Advance Vaccine Safety (R01 or R21)

The grant supports research that will contribute to the overall understanding of vaccine safety. This research opportunity invites studies that address scientific areas potentially relevant to vaccine safety such as: 
1) physiological and immunological responses to vaccines and vaccine components,
2) how genetic variations affect immune/physiological responses that may impact vaccine safety, 
3) identification of risk factors and biological markers that may be used to assess whether there is a relationship between certain diseases or disorders and licensed vaccines, or 
4) the application of genomic/molecular technologies to improve knowledge of vaccine safety


This grant is available in both the R01 and R21 scheme.  See more information here:
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PA-08-256.html (R01)
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PA-08-257.html (R21)
R01 = more money, but requires extensive preliminary research and expertise
R21 = less money, more exploratory and "risky" research


The deadline for this application is 8 January 2012.  The R01 is for up to 5 years of funding, with no formal budget limit.  The R21 is worth $275,000 over 2 years.