Funding Opportunity Number: RFA-DA-25-060
Deadline: August 15, 2024
Award Amount: up to $1,500,000.
Description
The purpose of this notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) is to support high priority research at the intersection of HIV and substance use. This NOFO invites research projects with the potential to open new areas of basic and clinical HIV/AIDS research and/or lead to new avenues for prevention, treatment and cure of HIV among people who use addictive substances. The scope of this NOFO includes basic science, epidemiologic, clinical, intervention, and implementation research. This initiative is open only to research teams of three to six PD/PIs proposing to pursue challenging research questions at the intersection of HIV and substance use. Teams are encouraged to consider far-reaching objectives that will produce major advances in high priority HIV research areas for the institute and the NIH
Applications responding to this NOFO are required to have a single overarching goal and an integrated research plan that incorporates multiple perspectives and disciplines to deliver transformative outcome(s) within the 5-year award period. This NOFO will support interdisciplinary teams that seek to cross methodologic and conceptual boundaries through interdisciplinary collaboration to achieve a single, focused, and transformative goal. The research goal must be well-defined and sufficiently focused so that meaningful outcomes can be accomplished within 5 years. It should also be of sufficient scope and complexity that it can only be achieved through an integrative interdisciplinary team effort and not by individual, parallel, or series of efforts. All contributions by each team member and components of the research plan are expected to come together in ways that are synergistic, integrated, and essential to the overarching goal.
Applications submitted under this NOFO are required to have a detailed research plan, preliminary data, and a clear description of the intersection between HIV and substance use that will be addressed. The proposed program goal must only be achievable by an interdisciplinary, collaborative research plan that creatively combines diverse expertise, approaches and/or research methodologies. The major thrust of the project must align with NIDA and NIH HIV research priorities described above. Addictive substances that are of interest include opioids, nicotine, cocaine, methamphetamine, other stimulants, prescription drugs, cannabinoids, xylene, or combinations of drugs (including alcohol).
The list below includes representative, but not exhaustive, examples of interdisciplinary opportunities applicable to high priority research at the intersection of HIV and substance use :
- Challenges existing paradigms of HIV testing, prevention an/or care, and overcomes long-standing roadblocks to progress in these areas.
- Develops new strategies based on systems-science approaches to drive innovative, transformative approaches of HIV testing, prevention, and/or care.
- Basic, translational, and/or clinical collaborations with a goal of reaching a significantly higher mechanistic understanding HIV and HIV latency in the central nervous system (CNS) including neurocognitive impairment in the context of HIV and substance use.
- Overcomes challenges in providing optimized ‘whole-person’ care (treatment for HIV, SUD, and comorbidities, and support services) that requires collaborations across various disciplines including clinical sciences, social and behavioral sciences, health economics, computational statistics, epidemiology, and implementation science etc.
- Address social determinants of health as they relate to the intersection of HIV and substance use in ways that go beyond descriptive research or interventions that focus on individual-level consequences of social/structural factors affecting health.
- Scientific efforts requiring integration of previously siloed and/or disparate areas of scientific, clinical or technical expertise relevant to HIV and substance use research fields.
- Challenges that necessitate bridging across species, systems (3D-tissue models), scales and disciplines to reveal shared/generalizable and/or unique biological processes linked to pathogenesis and persistence of HIV and the HIV-related comorbidities.
For more information, please see the opportunity website.