Notice of Special Interest (NOSI)—Advancing Development of Rapid Point-of-Care Hepatitis C Virus Diagnostics

The purpose of this Notice is to announce that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) are encouraging new applications to support translational research and development of rapid Point-of-Care diagnostics that will diagnose active viremic HCV infections. Applicants are encouraged to consult the target product profile for HCV diagnostics published by Reipold et al., BMC Infectious Diseases 2017, 17(Suppl 1):707 (https://doi.org/10.1186/s12879-017-2770-5) for additional preferred assay qualities and characteristics. In addition, the NCI has special interest in developing Point-of-Care testing for HCV diagnosis that will lead to further assessment of the liver damage, stage of fibrosis/cirrhosis and ultimately the risk for liver cancer.