Notice Number: NOT-AT-19-025

Key Dates
Release Date: August 6, 2019
First Available Due Date: September 5, 2019
Expiration Date: April 7, 2020

PA-19-270 - PHS 2019-02 Omnibus Solicitation of the NIH for Small Business Technology Transfer Grant Applications (Parent STTR [R41/R42] Clinical Trial Not Allowed

PA-19-271 - PHS 2019-02 Omnibus Solicitation of the NIH for Small Business Technology Transfer Grant Applications (Parent STTR [R41/R42] Clinical Trial Required

PA-19-272 - PHS 2019-02 Omnibus Solicitation of the NIH, CDC, and FDA for Small Business Innovation Research Grant Applications (Parent SBIR [R43/R44] Clinical Trial Not Allowed)

PA-19-273 - PHS 2019-02 Omnibus Solicitation of the NIH, CDC, and FDA for Small Business Innovation Research Grant Applications (Parent SBIR [R43/R44] Clinical Trial Required)

Issued by
National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH)
National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS)

Purpose

The purpose of this Notice of Special Interest (NOSI) is to support small businesses for stimulation of technological innovation in natural products research. Natural products offer a diverse reservoir of biologically active components. The single chemical entities, as well as their mixtures in natural product extracts, have a long history of use as drugs, drug precursors, and/or complementary health adjuvants. However, methodologies for the identification of bioactive natural products and their mechanism(s) of pharmacological action are often inadequate or too time consuming to be compatible with modern screening platforms. Potentially, many existing biotechnologies could be adapted to improve natural products research. Innovative methods may utilize genomics, bioengineering, bioinformatics, synthetic and molecular biology, and/or nanotechnology. These new and innovative methodologies and technologies should increase the efficiency of research in this field.

Background

Natural products can be essential sources of medicines. In many parts of the world, people still rely on traditional formulas made from natural products as the primary source of medicine. The modern pharmaceutical industry is also dependent on nature, with as much as 50% of all drugs based on natural products or derived from a natural product origin. Clearly, natural products offer excellent sources of health-promoting medicines. Thus, it is extremely important that we enhance our capacity to achieve a solid scientific understanding of their potential health benefits.

Nonetheless, substantial problems exist in identifying and understanding natural products and their bioactivity. While the potential for natural products in health and wellbeing is clear, the challenges that hamper the full utilization of these resources are many, with the greatest hurdle simply being the enormous amount of time and effort required for characterization of the chemical complexity in these mixtures and the mechanisms by which natural products exert their biological activity. While advances have been made to help overcome these hurdles, there exist many new and innovative untapped technological resources that can improve natural products research methodologies.

Research Objectives

With this NOSI via the Omnibus solicitation, NCCIH is proposing to focus on areas that could significantly improve the progress in natural products research. This NOSI is intended to help move useful technologies into the commercial marketplace by inviting SBIR grant applications from small businesses for further development of such technologies that are relevant to the missions of the sponsoring NIH institutes and centers. The supported research and development will likely include making the tools more robust and easier to use. NCCIH encourages new investigators as well as those investigators who are previous recipients and have shown significant progress in moving useful technologies into the commercial marketplace.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, those listed below:

• Technologies aimed at improving field applications for characterizing natural product sources/species and their diverse bioactive constituents, (e.g., activity-based profiling, biosensors, spectrometric equipment and techniques, etc.)
• Technologies aimed at the rapid removal of nuisance compounds in the crude extracts of natural products, (e.g., innovative chromatographic technologies, resins, catch and release-type systems, etc.)
• Technologies aimed at the development of highly sensitive phenotypic/high content bioassays including capacity to identify potential synergistic mechanisms (e.g., image-based cellular assays, multiple-endpoint analysis based on phenotypic changes, bioengineering chemically sensitive strains, etc.)
• Technologies aimed at the creation and exploitation of model systems for the expression of natural product constituents in high product yielding hosts (e.g., broad spectrum heterologous or homologous expression hosts, stimulation of biosynthetic pathways, mutation, etc.)
• Technologies aimed at predicting and/or quantifying risks of natural product drug interactions (e.g., in vitro interaction assays or kits, in silico technologies, etc.)

Topics that are not within the scope of this NOSI include:

• Approaches applicable to only one organism, biosynthetic pathway, and/or natural product or are of limited scope
• Optimization of large-scale production of natural products
• Chemical synthesis of natural products
• Approaches focused on spectral libraries of natural products
• Approaches based on collection or storage of natural products for screening

Application and Submission Information

This notice applies to applications with due dates on or after September 5, 2019 and subsequent receipt dates through April 7, 2020.Submit applications for this initiative using one of the following Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs) or any subsequent reissues of these announcements.Investigators should submit applications as responses to the active solicitation and application due dates will correspond to what is listed in the active Omnibus Solicitations. All instructions for the Parent Announcements must be followed. This NOSI is valid for active reiterations of the below mentioned FOAs until rescinded.

Although NCCIH is not listed as a Participating Organization in all the FOAs listed below, applications for this initiative will be accepted

All instructions in the SF424 (R&R) Application Guide and the listed funding opportunity announcements must be followed, with the following additions:

• For funding consideration, applicants must include "NOT-AT-19-025" (without quotation marks) in the Agency Routing Identifier field (box 4B) of the SF 424 R&R form. Applications nonresponsive to the terms of this notice and the FOA used for submission will be withdrawn.

Inquiries

Please direct all inquiries to the contacts in Section VII of the listed funding opportunity announcements with the following additions/substitutions:

Craig Hopp, Ph.D.
National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH)
Telephone: 301-496-5825
Email:hoppdc@mail.nih.gov