National Institutes of Health

Description

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) invites U54 cooperative agreement applications for Pilot Centers for Precision Disease Modeling. The goal of the Centers is to support collaborative research projects that link current personalized medicine efforts in human subjects with advances in animal genomics and technologies for genetic manipulation and creation of interspecies somatic hybrids. Functionally linking these areas of research will produce programs to enhance the predictive value of preclinical studies based on the use of precision animal models. Centers will create a process by which the research community can nominate unique human genomic variants for a cost effective high-throughput testing in an animal model pipeline. After validation of the expected gene editing, the Centers will establish assays to conduct comprehensive functional and phenotyping analysis to evaluate disease-causing variants. An important mission of the Centers will be the creation and distribution of precision animal model resources and related services to the biomedical community. Therefore, Centers will establish pipelines for preclinical scientific discovery, disease modeling, and development of interventions based on innovative animal models. Because these preclinical pipelines eventually will be an integral part of diagnostics, care and therapeutic treatment of patients, Centers should demonstrate how they intend to achieve this. Even though the Centers will work on a limited number of focused projects, it is expected that the program and pipeline(s) developed by the Center will maintain multifaceted research activities to build core model systems that can be adjusted as required to accommodate a broad spectrum of diseases.

Who can apply

• State governments
• County governments
• City or township governments
• Special district governments
• Independent school districts
• Public and State controlled institutions of higher education
• Native American tribal governments (Federally recognized)
• Public housing authorities / Indian housing authorities
• Native American tribal organizations (other than Federally recognized)
• Nonprofits with 501(c)(3) status (other than higher education)
• Nonprofits without 501(c)(3) status (other than higher education)
• Private institutions of higher education
• For-profit organizations other than small businesses
• Small businesses
• Others

Contact

NIH OER Webmaster <br/>FBOWebmaster@OD.NIH.GOV
FBOWebmaster@OD.NIH.GOV