Funding Opportunity Number: PAR-23-264
Deadlines
October 5, 2023
November 5, 2023
February 5, 2023
March 5, 2023
Purpose & Background
Through this Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO), the National Cancer Institute (NCI) intends to support discovery research for the identification of small molecules that function to elucidate the biology of cancer as chemical probes or function as activators or inhibitors of cancer target(s) for therapy. The scientific rationale for target selection must be provided. Small molecule tools or therapeutics may target tumor cells themselves or immune cells regulating tumor growth. Stages of discovery research covered by this NOFO include: 1) development of the primary screen assay(s) and testing in an initial pilot screen. Assays may focus on specific biological targets or disease mechanisms relevant to cancer with the intent to screen for small molecule compounds to be used as probes for advancing knowledge about the known target(s), identifying new targets, or as pre-therapeutic leads; 2) screen implementation of high throughput target-focused approaches or moderate throughput phenotypic- and fragment-based approaches to identify initial screening hits; 3) hit validation, including implementation of secondary assays that are orthogonal to the primary assay, advanced cheminformatics analysis and initial medicinal chemistry inspection to prioritize the hit set, and follow-up assays to characterize mode and mechanism of action of the validated hits. It is anticipated that applications submitted in response to this NOFO will focus on one or two of the above stages, as each stage depends on success of the prior stage.
Projects for this NOFO may focus on one stage, or span several stages of discovery research:
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- development of the primary screen assay(s) and testing in an initial pilot screen
- primary screen implementation
- hit validation
For more information, please see the funding opportunity website.