Team Grant : E-Rare-3 Joint Transnational Call (2019)

Well-being, Health and Biomedical Discovery

Deadlines

Academic Unit: Inquire with Unit

Memorial Deadline: Thursday 6th, June 2019

External Deadline: Tuesday 11th, June 2019

Description

CIHR-IG is pleased to be partnering with the Fond de recherche du Québec – Santé (FRQS), Muscular Dystrophy Canada (MDC), and 30 funding organizations in the context of the 1st EJP RD Joint Transnational Call for Rare Diseases Research Project (EJP RD JTC2019) call (Updated: 2019-02-19). CIHR-IG is committed to expanding and improving the diagnosis and treatment of rare diseases by creating the conditions needed to bring together creative, dynamic, interdisciplinary teams of researchers from across Canada and the EC to collaborate for better health outcome for the rare disease patient community.

The topic of the call is Research projects to accelerate diagnosis and/or explore disease progression and the mechanisms of rare diseases.

Projects shall involve a group of rare diseases or a single rare disease following the European definition i.e. a disease affecting not more than five in 10,000 persons in the European Community, EC–associated states and Canada. Applicants are encouraged to assemble groups of rare diseases based on solid criteria and commonalities if this leverages added value in sharing resources or expertise and has the capacity to elucidate common disease mechanisms and therapeutic targets.

The research projects submitted within this call must be based on novel ideas stemming from consolidated previous results or preliminary data and must be clearly endowed with benefit for the patients, i.e. studies allowing a rapid implementation into public health-related decisions or into the clinics. To achieve this goal, the necessary expertise and resources should be brought together from academia, clinical/public health sector and private companies whenever relevant. The research teams within a consortium should include investigators from complementary scientific disciplines, research areas and expertise necessary to achieve the proposed objectives.

The research proposals must demonstrate complementary and synergistic interaction among the partner teams. There should be clear added value in the transnational collaboration over the individual projects, in terms of:

1. Gathering a critical mass of subjects/patients and or subjects/patients databases and corresponding biological materials that would not be possible otherwise;
2. Sharing of resources (biobanks, models, databases, diagnostic tools, etc.), of specific know-how and/or innovative technologies including “-omics”, and of expertise. The projects should clearly demonstrate the potential health impact.

For more information, please consult EJP RD JTC2019.

Research Areas

Transnational research proposals must cover at least one of the following areas, which are equal in relevance for this call:

1. Research to accelerate diagnosis, e.g:
   • New schemes for finding diagnosis for undiagnosed patients;
   • Improved annotation and interpretation of variants and development of diagnostic tests for the more prevalent variants;
   • Novel modalities of functional analysis of candidate variants through in vitro, cell, tissue or animal studies.
   • -omic or multi-omic integrated approaches for discovery of disease causes and mechanisms including development of relevant bioinformatic tools;
2. Research to explore disease progression and mechanisms, e.g:
   • Natural history studies and patient registries (also for clinical trial readiness). Whenever possible these should include development and use of patient reported outcome measures. In addition, the exploration of the use of standardized M-Health-based surveillance instruments and of patient entered data to gather information for natural history studies is welcome;
   • Identification of clinical biomarkers, clinical outcome measures and surrogate endpoints;
   • Identification of novel pathophysiological pathways in appropriate disease models that effectively mimic the human condition.

Additional elements need to be considered in the application. For more information on these, as well as approaches and topics excluded from the scope of the call, please consult EJP RD JTC2019.

Additional program details are available on ResearchNet.

Funding Sources

Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR)

European Research Area Network (ERA-NET)