Olga Loizon Foundation Grant

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) invites applications for centers to support transdisciplinary teams of clinical and mental health services researchers, behavioral scientists, social scientists, health information and communications technologists, health systems engineers, decision scientists, and mental health stakeholders (e.g., service users, family members, clinicians, payers) to engage in high-impact studies that will significantly advance clinical practice and generate knowledge that will fuel transformation of mental health care in the United States. Advanced Laboratories for Accelerating the Reach and Impact of Treatments for Youth and Adults with Mental Illness (ALACRITY) Research Centers will support the rapid development, testing, and refinement of novel and integrative approaches for (1) optimizing the effectiveness of therapeutic or preventive interventions for mental disorders within well-defined target populations; (2) organizing and delivering optimized mental health services within real world treatment settings; and (3) continuously improving the quality, impact, and durability of optimized interventions and service delivery within diverse care systems. The ALACRITY Centers program is intended to support research that maximizes synergies across various components of the mental health research ecosystem, including new discoveries in clinical research, transformative health care technologies, advances in information science, and new federal and state mechanisms for organizing mental health care.

Through this Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO), the National Cancer Institute (NCI) intends to stimulate efforts to translate scientific discoveries and engineering developments into methods or tools that address problems in basic research to understand disease, or in applied research to assess risk, detect, prevent, diagnose, treat, and/or manage disease. The rationale is to deliver new capabilities to meet evolving requirements for technologies and methods relevant to the advance of research and delivery of care in pre-clinical, clinical and non-clinical settings, domestic or foreign, for conditions and diseases within the missions of participating institutes.

The purpose of this notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) is to solicit applications for pilot projects to elucidate a role for understudied proteins in rare disease. Awards will support generation of preliminary data and/or tools around eligible understudied protein(s). A list of eligible proteins is provided and are members of druggable protein families that have a known association with a rare disease. This NOFO is intended to jumpstart research on understudied proteins that are associated with rare diseases and provide applicants with sufficient funding to perform basic biochemical and/or biological work to further the characterization of understudied proteins within the context of rare disease.

Summary: The intent of the FY25 Toxic Exposures Research Program (TERP) Clinical Trial Partnership Award (CTPA) is to support new or existing collaborative partnerships that will rapidly implement clinical trials with the potential to have a significant impact on the prevention, treatment or management of symptoms, diseases, or conditions associated with or resulting from military-related toxic exposures. Proposed projects may range from small proof-of-concept clinical trials (e.g., pilot, first-in-human, phase 0) designed to demonstrate the feasibility or inform the design of more advanced trials through large-scale trials (including pragmatic clinical trials) to determine efficacy in relevant patient populations. Distinctive Features: To encourage applications that include meaningful and productive collaborations between investigators, the FY25 TERP CTPA requires partnership of the Initiating Principal Investigator (PI) with at least one, and up to two, other collaborating PIs for the completion of one overarching study.

The Disability and Rehabilitation Engineering program is part of the Engineering Biology and Health cluster, which also includes: 1) the Biophotonics program; 2) the Biosensing program; 3) the Cellular and Biochemical Engineering program; and 4) the Engineering of Biomedical Systems program. The Disability and Rehabilitation Engineering program supports fundamental engineering research that will improve the quality of life of persons with disabilities through the development of new theories, methodologies, technologies, or devices. Disabilities could be developmental, cognitive, hearing, mobility, visual, selfcare, independent living, or other. Proposed projects must advance knowledge regarding a specific human disability or pathological motion or understanding of injury mechanisms. Research may be supported that is directed toward the characterization, restoration, rehabilitation, and/or substitution of human functional ability or cognition, or to the interaction between persons with disabilities and their environment. Areas of particular interest are neuroengineering, rehabilitation robotics, brain-inspired assistive or rehabilitative systems, theoretical or computational methods, and novel models of functional recovery including the development and application of artificial physiological systems. Emphasis is placed on significant advancement of fundamental engineering knowledge that facilitates transformative outcomes. The DARE Program encourages high-risk/high-reward proposals that surpass incremental technological improvements. The DARE Program also encourages participatory design and the inclusion of trainees with disabilities as part of the proposed research or broader impacts. Innovative proposals outside of the above specific interest areas may be considered. NSF does not support clinical trials; however, feasibility studies involving human volunteers may be supported if appropriate to the project objectives. The development and application of artificial physiological systems that do not model functional recovery and instead improve fundamental understanding of physiological and pathophysiological processes would be appropriate for EBMS. Furthermore, the DARE program does not support proposals having as their central theme commercialization of a product. Small businesses seeking early stage R&D funding for product development are encouraged to contact the NSF SBIR/STTR program in the America's Seed Fund within the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP).