Notice Number: NOT-RM-17-022

Key Dates
Release Date: May 15, 2017

Issued by
Office of Strategic Coordination (Common Fund)

Purpose

The NIH Common Fund announces the opportunity for investigators with relevant active NIH awards to submit administrative supplement applications for validation of protein capture reagents generated by the NIH Common Fund Protein Capture Reagents Program (PCRP) through PA-16-287.

The Common Fund PCRP was a pilot program to test the feasibility of producing low-cost, renewable, and reliable protein affinity reagents in a manner that can be scaled ultimately to the entire human proteome. The program focused on the production of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) and recombinant antibodies (rAbs) against human transcription factors (TFs), a fundamentally important set of proteins for which low cost and reliable antibodies have been lacking. The program generated a total of over 1,500 antibodies, covering over 650 TF targets. To make these reagents more easily accessible to the community, the PCRP has developed a web portal (http://proteincapture.org) that provides a searchable catalog of reagents with ordering information and limited assay results. To improve the utility of the reagents to the broad community, administrative supplements are being provided to rigorously validate the entire set or a well-rationalized subset of reagents.

Investigators with relevant active NIH research project grants are encouraged to submit administrative supplement applications to PA-16-287 (Administrative Supplements to Existing NIH Grants and Cooperative Agreements  (Admin Supp)) to undertake a systematic evaluation of the reagents, either a subset or the entire set. It is expected that the evaluative results will be published in a peer-reviewed journal. The results must also be uploaded to the PCRP portal for broad community assessment and use.

Examples of subsets of PCRP reagents that may be particularly appropriate for analysis include, but are not limited to reagents that bind:

• Human transcription factors already demonstrated to be of great biological importance
• Human transcription factors about which little is known, but for which binding reagents may spur further research
• Human transcription factors that bind site-specifically to DNA with high affinity

Examples of the types of assays that are of interest include, but are not limited to:

• High throughput ChIP-seq or variations of such techniques such as ChIP-exo
• Transcription factor binding microarray
• IP/MS analysis

Evaluation of the applications will be consistent with the criteria used for the parent awards, including significance, potential impact, approach, and investigator qualifications.

Parent grants may be issued from any NIH Institute or Center (IC). The requested award budget cannot exceed direct cost of parent award or $250,000, whichever is less. This is expected to be a one year supplement with the possibility for a second year depending on project requirements and funds available. All supplement requests must propose activities that are within the scope of the parent award.

To be considered for FY2017 funding, applications for administrative supplements must check the submission guidelines and receipt dates of the IC that manages the parent award. Additionally, prior to submission, applicants must review the awarding IC's web site to ensure they meet the IC's requirements.  A list of those web sites is available at https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/admin_supp/index.htm.

All prospective applicants are strongly encouraged to discuss potential requests with their program official in addition to the contact below. Applicants also are strongly encouraged to inform the contact below upon submission of the application.

Inquiries

Please direct all inquiries to:

Ananda L. Roy, Ph.D.
Office of the Director (OD)
Telephone: 301-435-8056
Email: [email protected]