Funding Opportunities from The Kidney Precision Medicine Project (KPMP)

Here is the funding opportunity information from The Kidney Precision Medicine Project (KPMP):

"

1. Obtain healthy reference tissue to help build the KPMP kidney tissue atlas

There is a critical need to obtain human healthy reference tissue, including but not limited to, tissue from healthy living donors or healthy volunteers to develop the KPMP kidney tissue atlas. This solicitation aims to form new collaborative partnerships by providing KPMP opportunity pool funds to applicants proposing to ethically and safely obtain, share, and harmonize human healthy reference kidney tissue with the KPMP. Strong applications will provide non-degraded (“pristine”) tissue with the necessary diversity (sex, age, race, and ethnicity) and metadata (including relevant longitudinal clinical data) to meet the objectives of the KPMP. Ideally, it is expected that applicants will employ current KPMP protocols to obtain, share, and harmonize (using associated metadata) at least 20 healthy reference tissue samples per year. Deceased donor and tumor nephrectomy tissue are not eligible for this funding opportunity.

Five (5) page applications requesting up to $100,000 total costs per year for three years are due June 28, 2019 by 5 p.m. Pacific

2. Develop kidney biomimetic “phantoms” as quality control standards

There is a critical need to develop novel biomimetic “phantoms” that can serve as quality control standards to normalize batch effects (ensure traceability, version control, rigor, and reproducibility) and to enhance the ability of the research community to compare results from diverse tissue integration methods performed at different sites and at different times. This solicitation aims to form new collaborative partnerships by providing KPMP opportunity pool funds to applicants proposing to design, fabricate, characterize, produce, and distribute novel biomimetic phantoms. Ideally, the phantoms will perform several diverse tasks including, but not limited to:

1. Tissue processing and Pre-analytic control. A highly sensitive indicator that can accurately monitor changes (either directly or indirectly) over time to tissue ischemia, hypoxia, analyte degradation, etc. (analogous to a tracking device that can monitor temperature changes of a shipped package).
2. Analytic control. A highly stable positive control with reproducible signal integrity over time of appropriate reference transcripts, proteins, metabolites, cells, structures, etc. (analogous to molecular weight markers used for quantitative and qualitative comparisons).

All phantoms need to be fit for purpose (bulk tissue analysis, single cell analysis, immunohistochemistry, proteomics, metabolomics, etc.). Phantoms designed for image-based tissue interrogation methods likely need to have similar mechanical, thermal, electrical, acoustic and optical properties to those of adult human kidney.

Upon development and validation, it is anticipated that phantoms will be included alongside (not “spiked-into”) every KPMP biopsy obtained from patient participants (to monitor changes that occur in tissue integrity during procurement, shipping, handling, etc.) and used as positive controls for each tissue interrogation platform (to assess experimental variability over time). As described above, it’s unlikely that a single phantom will be able to accomplish all tasks. Thus, it is acknowledged that a panel or suite of phantoms – each optimized for a subset of tasks – will be required to accomplish all of these diverse tasks. Strong applications will fully consider the current tissue processing protocols and analytic pipelines used by the KPMP.

Five (5) page applications requesting up to $100,000 total costs per year for three years are due June 28, 2019 by 5 p.m. Pacific

3. Apply for a Glue Grant to partner with the KPMP

This solicitation aims to form new collaborative partnerships by providing “glue grants” to investigators working in areas of high relevance to the KPMP and currently supported by other significant non-KPMP funding sources. Examples of other significant funding sources include, but are not limited to, an NIH R01, RC2, DP3, or U01 award, or a VA MERIT award.

Successful glue grants are expected to be mutually beneficial. Applicants should describe how their “parent” project will benefit from being part of the KPMP and how the KPMP will benefit from partnering with the “parent” project. Specifically, glue grant funding will provide a supplement of up to $60,000 total costs per year to the “parent” project to support sharing, harmonization, and integration with the KPMP of relevant data, samples, tissues, reagents, technologies, tools, software, analytic pipelines, expertise, etc.

Five (5) page applications may request up to $5,000 total costs per month and are invited on a rolling basis beginning June 3, 2019 "

Source information: https://kpmp.org/opportunity-pool/