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September NIH Highlighted Funding Opportunities

Understanding Expectancies in Cancer Symptom Management (R01 Clinical Trial Required)

Application Date: Varies based on award cycle (see RFA for dates)

This Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) will solicit mechanistic research that aims to understand how and why expectancy effects occur in a cancer context, elucidate their role in cancer symptom management, and identify patients, symptoms, cancer sites, and contexts in which expectancy effects can be leveraged to improve cancer outcomes. Expectancies are defined in this context as beliefs about future outcomes, including one’s response to cancer or cancer treatment. Expectancies can be evoked by social, psychological, environmental, and systemic factors. Expectancy effects are the cognitive, behavioral, and biological outcomes caused by expectancies. Expectancy effects can be generated by expectancies held by patients, clinicians, family members, caregivers, and/or dyadic/social networks. Program is particularly interested in applications that enroll individuals and groups from populations historically underrepresented or excluded from biomedical and behavioral research.

Systems-Level Risk Detection and Interventions to Reduce Suicide, Ideation, and Behaviors in Youth from Underserved Populations (R01 Clinical Trial Optional)

Application Date: Letter of intent due January 20, 2024

This initiative supports research to test the effectiveness of combined strategies to both detect and intervene to reduce the risk of suicide, suicide ideation and behavior (SIB), and/or non-suicidal self-harm (NSSI) specifically among children, adolescents, and transition-age youth/young adults from underserved populations. Specifically, this Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) encourages services research aimed at testing easily implemented systems-level interventions and strategies that improve systematic risk identification, coordinated referral to, or engagement and retention in quality care for prevention of SIB and/or NSSI among adolescents and children from the targeted populations. Opportunities for detection and prevention in youth may occur at various points of contact across an array of mental health specialty and non-specialty settings.

The service strategies to be tested under this announcement should be designed for delivery in typical service settings using commonly available personnel and resources, to enhance implementation and future uptake in diverse settings, and thereby reduce risk of suicide and self-harm. Given the importance of cultural, social, and contextual factors, the intervention strategies should account for individual-, family-, community-, provider-, and organizational-level factors to optimize effectiveness, feasibility, acceptability, rapid uptake and sustained delivery. The strategy should also improve connections to preventive and treatment interventions with proven effectiveness in reducing SIB or NSSI, with the goal of making these interventions more available, accessible, and more effectively delivered to youth, in a sustained and coordinated way. This NOFO encourages research focused on systems-level interventions and is not intended to support the development or testing of new screening tools, assessment instruments, or individual-level preventive or therapeutic interventions.

This NOFO is published in parallel to a companion R34 NOFO (RFA-MH-25-125) supporting pilot studies in preparation for the larger-scale studies described here. This NOFO is focused on services interventions for use in settings that primarily serve underserved youth.

Community-Engaged Health Equity Research in Neuroscience Initiative

Application Date: View cycle dates on RFA for specific deadlines

This NOFO solicits applications for planning grants to assess feasibility and/or determine best practices to conduct community-engaged health equity research in neurological disorders with populations that experience health disparities (HDPs). If successful, these planning grants would support, enable and/or lay the groundwork for future clinical studies or trials. In addition to posing a research question related to addressing health disparities in neurological disorders, applicants must also be filling a gap in 1) Engagement with one or more HDP communities; and/or 2) Multidisciplinary research team expertise in neurological disorders, health disparities research and/or community-engaged research. Expected outcomes would advance understanding of drivers of health disparities and barriers to neurological health equity and establish collaborative research teams, including community partners, with appropriate expertise in community engagement with HDPs, health disparities research and neurological disorders.

Research Tools for Difficult to Culture Eukaryotic Pathogens

Application Date: View cycle dates on RFA for specific deadlines

The purpose of this Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) is to support high risk, milestone-driven approaches for the development of robust culture techniques, and/or genetic and molecular tools to better understand the biology of select human eukaryotic pathogens including the microsporidian Enterocytozoon bieneusi; Pneumocystis jirovecii; Plasmodium vivax; and Babesia microti. This NOFO will use a milestone-driven, biphasic award mechanism. Transition to the second phase will depend on the successful completion of milestones.