NIH HIV Incidence Assays with Improved Specificity (R01)

This grant encourages applications from institutions/ organizations that propose to develop improved HIV Incidence Assays with increased specificity and reliability for distinguishing incident from chronic HIV infections, especially cost-effective assays and algorithms with improved specificity and reliability for determining HIV incidence.  Ideally, the assay would be accurate for diverse HIV-1 subtypes and could be performed in resource limited settings.


For more information, go to: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PA-12-012.html

Application budgets are not limited, but need to reflect actual needs of the proposed project.  The next deadline is 7 January 2011.  The deadline following that one will be 7 May 2011.

NIH Exploratory Developmental Research Grant Program (Parent R21)

The R21 mechanism is intended to encourage new exploratory and developmental research projects. 

All subjects and disciplines are eligible, but the research must be high-risk, high-impact, and highly innovative.

For example, such projects could assess the feasibility of a novel area of investigation or a new experimental system that has the potential to enhance health-related research.  Another example could include the unique and innovative use of an existing methodology to explore a new scientific area. These studies may involve considerable risk but may lead to a breakthrough in a particular area, or to the development of novel techniques, agents, methodologies, models, or applications that could have a major impact on a field of biomedical, behavioral, or clinical research.

This grant is worth $275,000 over 2 years.  The nearest deadline is 16 February 2012


For more information, see: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PA-10-069.html

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). All disciplines/subjects are eligible to apply.


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 February 2011.  There are regular deadlines every February, June, and October.

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.