Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Development of Software Tools and Methods for Biomedical Big Data in Targeted Areas of High Need (U01) | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The grant opportunity RFA-CA-15-017, titled "Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Development of Software Tools and Methods for Biomedical Big Data in Targeted Areas of High Need (U01)," is a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Funding Opportunity Announcement built around the BD2K initiative. Its central goal is to push forward practical, usable software tools and computational methods that help the biomedical research community handle major pain points created by large-scale biomedical data. The award mechanism is a U01 cooperative agreement, which generally means NIH expects substantial programmatic involvement during the project period, including coordination, milestones, and close interaction between the awardees and NIH staff to keep development aligned with community needs and BD2K priorities.

The FOA focuses on three targeted technical areas where NIH identified high need. First is data privacy, meaning tools and methods that help protect sensitive biomedical and health-related data while still enabling meaningful research. This can include approaches that reduce the risk of re-identification, improve controlled-access workflows, support privacy-preserving analyses, or otherwise make it easier to share and analyze data responsibly. Second is data repurposing, which is about methods and software that make existing datasets more reusable for new scientific questions beyond their original intent. In practice, this can involve harmonizing disparate datasets, improving cross-study comparability, enabling integration across data types, or building tooling that allows researchers to extract new value from legacy or underused resources. Third is applying metadata, emphasizing better ways to capture, represent, standardize, and use metadata so that biomedical datasets become easier to find, interpret, integrate, and computationally analyze. Metadata-focused work might include improved annotation practices, structured descriptors, standards implementation, or tools that help researchers generate and leverage metadata at scale.

Although the FOA is designed to stimulate new development, it explicitly invites proposals that significantly adapt existing methods and software as well. That detail matters because it signals NIH is open to projects that start from mature or widely used tools and push them into new domains, scale them up, harden them for broader use, or extend them to directly address the privacy, repurposing, or metadata gaps BD2K is trying to close. In other words, the emphasis is not just novelty for its own sake, but delivering robust, impactful capabilities that solve real biomedical big-data problems in these priority areas.

From an administrative and funding perspective, the opportunity is classified as discretionary funding and uses the cooperative agreement instrument. The estimated total funding listed is $5,000,000, and the award ceiling is $300,000. There is no cost sharing or matching requirement, which reduces barriers for applicants who may not have non-federal funds to contribute. The opportunity was posted on July 23, 2015, with an original and current closing date of October 6, 2015, and an archive date of November 6, 2015. Even though it is archived, the summary still reflects what NIH was seeking at the time: deliverable-oriented software and methods development aligned with BD2K objectives.

Eligibility is broad and includes many common U.S.-based research and development applicant types: small businesses, other for-profit organizations, nonprofits (including 501(c)(3) and certain non-501(c)(3) entities), public and private institutions of higher education, and multiple levels of government (state, county, city/township, special district). It also lists specific categories frequently referenced in federal eligibility language, such as HBCUs, Hispanic-serving institutions, AANAPISIs, tribally controlled colleges and universities, tribal governments and organizations, faith-based or community-based organizations, regional organizations, U.S. territories or possessions, and eligible federal agencies. A key restriction is that non-U.S. (foreign) institutions are not eligible to apply as applicant organizations, though non-U.S. components of U.S. organizations may be eligible, and foreign components (as defined under NIH policy) are allowed. This structure is typical for NIH opportunities that want to maintain a U.S. applicant base while still allowing certain international collaborations or subcomponents when they strengthen the proposed work.

The FOA is associated with a wide range of CFDA program numbers spanning environmental health, genomics, mental health, substance use, general biomedical research infrastructure, translational science, aging, child health, vision, and medical library assistance, among others. That broad CFDA listing reflects the cross-cutting nature of BD2K: the tools and methods being developed are meant to support many NIH mission areas rather than a single disease domain. The sponsoring agency is the NIH, and the full announcement was made available through the NIH grants guide at the listed link (http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-CA-15-017.html). For access or technical issues, the contact point provided is the NIH Office of Extramural Research (OER) webmaster via FBOWebmaster@OD.NIH.GOV.

Overall, this opportunity can be understood as an NIH-backed push to make biomedical big data more usable and trustworthy by funding deliverable-driven, community-relevant software and methodological advances in privacy, reuse/repurposing, and metadata. The U01 cooperative structure indicates NIH was not just funding exploratory research, but aiming to shepherd the development of tools and approaches that could be adopted by the broader biomedical ecosystem and improve the day-to-day realities of working with large, complex datasets.

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