Funding Opportunity Number: PAR-25-244
Deadlines: February 16, 2025, March 16, 2025
Specific Research Objectives
The goal of this NOFO is to stimulate interest in the characterization and functional analysis of biological factors associated with cancer health disparities and to provide funding opportunities in this area. Applications should focus on basic cancer research, consistent with the research interests of the NCI’s Division of Cancer Biology (DCB), Division of Cancer Prevention (DCP), and Center for Cancer Health Equity (CCHE).
The DCB supports research on the discovery and characterization of basic pathways and mechanisms that regulate the development of a pre-malignant state, initiation of cellular transformation and cancer cell progression, formation of tumor microenvironment, metastasis, and host responses to cancer, including immunologic or metabolic responses.
The CCHE supports cancer health disparity research focused on basic, hypothesis driven studies that explicitly address the unequal burden of cancer amongst racial/ethnic or other underserved populations across the cancer continuum (prevention, early detection, diagnosis, treatment, and survivorship).
The DCP supports research that will generate new information about molecular processes that are susceptible to intervention throughout the cancer continuum until invasive cancer and underlying mechanisms of cancer and its sequelae (i.e., mechanistic studies on the prevention or treatment of acute and chronic symptoms and morbidities related to cancer and its treatment), developing effective cancer screening and prevention strategies, discovering early detection biomarkers, and pinpointing mechanistically targeted nutrients in cancer prevention.
This NOFO encourages basic research projects that will develop and test new methodologies and new research technologies focused on specific topics in cancer health disparities. The availability of annotated clinical samples as well as enabling technologies (genomics/epigenomics, proteomics, metabolomics, single cell analysis, imaging) make it feasible to study biological factors that contribute to cancer health disparities among different racial/ethnic populations.
Research projects must propose to investigate the interplay of race/ethnicity and/or other social determinants with cancer biology to mechanistically explain an unequal burden of cancer among populations. As such, proposed studies are encouraged to use biospecimens, patient derived models, and/or data sets derived from different racial/ethnic and/or underserved groups. Studies investigating age or sex disparities, in the absence of race/ethnicity variables, are not solicited. Research projects using a comparative research design between at least two populations are encouraged, in which one or more is underserved.
As this NOFO is focused upon basic research, immediate clinically translational potential of the proposed project is NOT a requirement for the proposed projects.
For more information, please see the opportunity webpage.