Giving Grant Applications a Second Chance

Giving Grant Applications a Second Chance

NIH receives many meritorious grant applications for which there are inadequate resources to fund. Thanks to the Online Partnership to Accelerate Research (OnPAR), there is now a second chance at funding for these applications.

Leidos Health’s Life Sciences has partnered with NIH to accelerate health research by matching high-scoring (e.g., those within the 30th percentile), unfunded NIH applications with private biomedical foundations and/or industries seeking to fund promising research via OnPAR.

The list of research of interest to OnPAR foundations and industries is diseased focused, but many of these diseases have considerable social and behavioral aspects, including diabetes, arthritis, lupus, Crohn’s disease, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, stroke, and peripheral arterial disease. OnPAR is also interested in research on wearable technologies and smartphone applications for early detection of disease initiation and progression.

To have your unfunded NIH grant application considered by OnPAR, it needs to be submitted to OnPAR within one year of the council review date of your grant application, scored within the 30th percentile, and not have been selected for funding by the NIH. NIH program officers are not involved in this process; it the sole responsibility of the investigators to submit their application to OnPAR.

The OBSSR has a co-funding program to assist NIH Institutes and Centers in funding behavioral and social science research grant applications, but this program is insufficient to assist in the funding of all the meritorious behavioral and social science research that the NIH receives. The OnPAR opportunity provides researchers with a second chance for funding of their grant application when the NIH, even with OBSSR’s co-funding assistance, is unable to fund their application. Behavioral and social science researchers are encouraged to take advantage of this opportunity.