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NB: Concepts represent early planning stages for PAs, RFAs, or RFPs for Council 's input. Council approval does not guarantee that a concept will become an initiative.
If NIAID publishes an initiative from one of these concepts, we link to it below. For a full list of initiatives, go to NIAID Funding Opportunities.
Table of Contents
Regional Centers of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases
For the published initiative, see the December 21, 2007, Guide announcement.
Request for Applications
Contact: Rona Hirschberg
Phone: 301-402-4197
Email: rhirschberg@niaid.nih.gov
Objective: To support regionally based, multi-institutional centers that will promote interdisciplinary research activities leading to development of vaccines, therapeutics, adjuvants, and diagnostics for biodefense and emerging infectious diseases.
Description: The RCE consortia will stimulate synergy among researchers in their regions so that important, complex problems in biodefense and emerging infectious disease (EID) research may be addressed. In addition, RCEs will: be prepared and available to assist first responders in the event of a national biodefense or EID emergency; train new investigators and technical personnel for biodefense and EID research; provide research resources including core facilities, career development opportunities, and pilot research project support to partners in their regions; work with RCEs in other regions to undertake mutually beneficial transcenter activities; provide national scientific leadership for biodefense and EID research; and form partnerships with industry, government, and academia to leverage resources. Emphasis is on providing translational capacity, maintaining flexibility for changing and developing research needs, and responding to unique research opportunities. The RCEs are a cornerstone of NIAID’s Biodefense Network.
Cooperative Research Partnerships for Biodefense
For the published initiative, see the February 21, 2008, Guide announcement, Cooperative Research Partnerships for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases.
Request
for Applications
Contact: Michael Schaefer
Phone: 301-402-4197
Email: mschaefer@niaid.nih.gov
Objective: To support research that will advance development of vaccines, therapeutics, adjuvants, and diagnostics for biodefense and emerging infectious diseases as outlined in the DHHS Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise Implementation Plan.
Description: This program will stimulate collaborative efforts and multidisciplinary approaches to generate and/or advance promising candidate products or platform technologies through the product development pathway. Partnerships between researchers from different disciplines and industrial laboratories will be strongly encouraged to facilitate discovery, design, and/or development of new products including therapeutics and immunotherapeutics, diagnostics, vaccines, and adjuvants. Clinical trials will not be supported under this program.
Application of Platform Technologies for the Development of Therapeutic Agents
For the published initiative, see the February 15, 2008 solicitation, Application of Platform Technologies for the Development of Therapeutics for Biodefense.
Broad Agency Announcement
Contact: Robert Singman
Phone: 301-451-2607
Email: rsingman@niaid.nih.gov
Objective: The primary objective of this effort is to evaluate platform technologies, as they are applied to biodefense therapeutic countermeasures for their capability to provide broad advances in drug technologies that may be widely applicable to drug development.
Description: Platform technologies may address two areas:
- Improvements in product performance, such as:
- Technologies that support development of drugs with broad spectrum activity.
- Novel delivery systems.
- Stability.
- Potency and efficacy.
- Bioavailability.
- Safety.
- Improvements in product development, such us:
- Universal expression frameworks (e.g. RNAi; monoclonal antibody frameworks).
- Manufacturing platforms (e.g. microwave technology for chemical synthesis).
This initiative will support development of specific products in which one or more platform technologies are proposed. Funds may be provided for Investigational New Drug (IND)-, New Drug Application (NDA)- and Biologic License Application (BLA)-enabling activities, including: preclinical evaluation, manufacturing, formulation, delivery development, evaluation in animal models, and Phase 1 and 2 clinical trials. Offerors will be asked to clearly define how the proposed platform technologies are likely to broadly contribute to drug development technologies, as well as how the specific product they are proposing to develop will contribute to the gaps in biodefense countermeasures.
Genomic Sequencing Centers for Infectious Diseases
For the published initiative, see the March 11, 2008 solicitation.
Request for Proposals
Contact: Harry Brubaker
Phone: 301-443-2966
Email: brubakerh@niaid.nih.gov
Objective: To establish cost effective, state-of-the-art genomic sequencing centers that will support a diverse set of high-throughput sequencing and comparative genomic sequencing and genotyping, and promote the rapid release of genome data and reagents into public databases and repositories for use by the scientific community.
Description: Centers will be established with demonstrated ability to generate genome sequences from well characterized microbial strains and clinical isolates, and examine genetic variation in populations and communities of human pathogens and also across the human genome that is designed to identify genetic associations with observable phenotypes in the pathogen and human host. These include microbial genetic correlates of disease emergence, virulence, and transmissibility, and host genetic factors that are associated with susceptibility to infection, disease severity, progression and outcome, responses to vaccination, and therapeutics. There will be more emphasis on sequencing multiple strains and isolates of specific microbial species than on sequencing individual organisms.
Bioinformatics Resource Centers
Request for Proposals
Contact: Sharon Kraft
Phone: 301-496-0195
Email: skraft@niaid.nih.gov
Objective: To establish and maintain Bioinformatics Resource Centers (BRCs) to collect, update, integrate, annotate, and publicly disseminate to the scientific community a variety of data including genomics, proteomics, epidemiology, host/pathogen interaction data, genotype/phenotype correlation data, and other types of experimentally generated data related to multiple pathogens, including those in the NIAID Category A-C priority lists for biodefense research, their related species, as well as other non-biodefense human pathogens.
Description: Bioinformatics Resource Centers will provide scientific, web-based database resources to researchers who use genomics and related data of microbial organisms in their investigations. To provide these resources, the Centers will:
- Collect and efficiently update data for multiple pathogens.
- Establish databases that store, integrate, and annotate a large variety and quantity of experimental data types from different public and private data sources.
- Develop interfaces to the databases to allow external users to easily query, retrieve, analyze, upload, and download data.
- Develop software tools and algorithms to analyze and curate pathogen data, perform comparative genomics studies, generate orthologous families of genes and proteins, annotate functional molecular networks, generate lists of computationally predicted targets for vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics development, etc. Software developed by the Centers shall be made available with an open source license, with the appropriate tutorial and help documentation. Data generated by the Centers will also be publicly disseminated to the scientific community.
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