Funding Opportunity Number: PA-25-169
Deadline: June 16, 2025, October 16, 2025
Description
This Trailblazer Award is an opportunity for New and Early Stage Investigators to pursue research programs at the interface of engineering and/or the physical sciences with the biomedical sciences. Applicants are encouraged to contact the appropriate NIBIB Program Director assigned to their specific scientific program area (https://www.nibib.nih.gov/research-funding to discuss the appropriateness of the project before submission. This Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) employs an R21 Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant mechanism enhanced to provide $400,000 in direct costs over three years, allowing expanded time and resources to pursue a new or emerging research program.
The application of principles and techniques from engineering and the quantitative sciences, such as physics, mathematics, chemistry, and computer sciences, is providing innovative technologies and novel methods to accelerate the pace of biomedical research, producing new understanding of disease mechanisms and translating these new discoveries to improve human health. The Trailblazer Award seeks to catalyze the development of transdisciplinary research approaches with the potential to open new areas of biomedical investigation.
A Trailblazer project may be exploratory, developmental, proof of concept or have high risk-high impact goals. Importantly, the proposed research for this NOFO may be technology design-directed and may or may not be hypothesis-driven. In the context of this NOFO, innovation encompasses approaches to address well-defined, unmet biomedical research needs through the development of new methods, ideas, or technologies; early steps along the path toward delivery of a new capability or method; and the integration of existing components in a previously unproven format. High-impact projects should transform our understanding or practice by applying an innovative approach to an important biomedical challenge. For projects supported by a Trailblazer Award, successful results should provide a solid foundation for further research under other funding mechanisms, such as the R01. Applicants will be considered ineligible for this funding opportunity if they have submitted an R01, R15 or any other R21 application, with a participating IC as the primary IC within the same review cycle. An awardee may not hold concurrent Trailblazer awards.
Trailblazer approaches are expected to differ substantially from current thinking or practice, therefore, extensive preliminary data demonstrating feasibility is an indication that the project is beyond the scope of this NOFO. Reviewers’ determinations of merit will rely instead on the conceptual framework, the level of innovation, and the potential to significantly advance our knowledge, understanding or practice. Applicants can provide appropriate justification for the proposed work through literature citations, data from other publicly available sources, or analytical and computational models. The proposed research will likely involve considerable risk that the work may not be successful, so applicants should clearly explain the significance of the work to allow the reviewers to determine whether the potential impact justifies these risks.
For more detailed information, please see the opportunity webpage.