NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The National Center for Research Resources will support development of wide a range of new biomedical research tools, including core technologies used in genomics and proteomics, under a three-year grant program.
NCRR plans to use up to $1 million in 2011 to support between five and eight grants to develop new or improved instrumentation that can be used by a wide range of biomedical or clinical researchers, and which are not focused on a specific organ or disease.
The aim of the new program is to fund development of tools and instruments, including new methodologies or software, so long as the proposal is not focused on medical informatics or bioinformatics. These research efforts should develop new instruments that are more powerful or more precise and which have broad applicability to biomedical research.
The new tools and techniques researchers seek to develop could include tools for use in proteomics, mass spectrometry, genomic sequencing, functional and comparative genomics, microarrays, human genotyping, electrophoresis, bioreactors, and other applications.
This grant will use the R21 funding mechanism, which is designed to support applications that have few or no preliminary findings supporting them, so investigators with substantial preliminary data should apply for NCRR funding under other programs.