Notice Number: NOT-AG-18-012

Key Dates
Release Date: April 27, 2018

Estimated Publication Date of Announcement: June 2018
First Estimated Application Due Date: November 2018
Earliest Estimated Award Date: May 2019
Earliest Estimated Start Date: July 2019

Issued by
National Institute on Aging (NIA)

Purpose

The National Institute on Aging intends to promote a new initiative by publishing a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) to solicit applications aimed at establishing multi-component Alzheimer Centers for the Discovery of New Medicines. The overarching purpose of this Centers program is to improve, diversify and reinvigorate the Alzheimer’s disease (AD) drug development pipeline by accelerating the characterization and experimental validation of next generation therapeutic targets and integrating the targets into drug discovery campaigns. To this end, the funded Centers will design and develop tools that support target enabling packages (TEPs) for the experimental validation of novel, next generation therapeutic targets, including those emanating from the NIA-funded, target discovery programs such as AMP-AD , and initiate early stage drug discovery campaigns against the enabled targets. This initiative will promote the rapid dissemination of all tools and methods generated by the Center to all qualified researchers for their use in drug discovery and advancing the understanding of disease biology.

This Notice is being provided to allow potential applicants sufficient time to develop meaningful collaborations and appropriate projects. 

The FOA is expected to be published in June 2018 with an expected application due date in November 2018.

This FOA will utilize the U54, a Specialized Center, milestone-driven cooperative agreement. Details of the planned FOA are provided below.

Research Initiative Details

This Notice encourages investigators with expertise and insights in translational research, experimental validation of therapeutic targets and, drug discovery to begin to consider applying for this new FOA.

In addition, collaborative investigations combining expertise in bioinformatics, computational biology, network biology, Alzheimer's disease biology, biochemistry, biophysics, structural biology, biostatistics, assay development, medicinal chemistry, pharmacology and, clinical science will be encouraged and these investigators should also begin considering applying for this application.

The goal of this initiative is to encourage creative and innovative research aimed at improving, diversifying and reinvigorating the AD drug development pipeline; as such, applications should propose studies that enable the characterization and experimental validation of next generation Alzheimer's drug targets and, integrate these targets into drug discovery campaigns.

APPLICATIONS ARE NOT BEING SOLICITED AT THIS TIME.

Inquiries

Please direct all inquiries to:

Lorenzo M. Refolo, Ph.D.
National Institute on Aging(NIA)
Telephone:301-594-7576
Email: refolol@nia.nih.gov