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