Clinical and Data Coordinating Center(s) for Parkinsons Disease Biomarkers Identification Network (PD BIN) (U01) | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

This NIH opportunity (RFA-NS-11-005) from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) supports the creation of a coordinated national research infrastructure called the Parkinsons Disease Biomarker Identification Network (PD BIN). The central goal is to speed the discovery and validation of biological markers that can indicate Parkinsons disease (PD) risk, predict or confirm onset, and track progression over time. By building a reliable, standardized resource of clinical information and biospecimens, the program is meant to remove major bottlenecks in the development of disease-modifying therapies, where objective biomarkers are critical for selecting participants, measuring target engagement, and detecting treatment effects earlier and more accurately than clinical symptoms alone.

The funding mechanism is a cooperative agreement (U01), meaning awardees will work closely with NINDS in a substantial partnership rather than operating as fully independent investigator-initiated projects. The FOA specifically solicits two linked, coordinated applications: one for a Clinical Coordinating Center (CCC) and one for a Data Coordinating Center (DCC). The principal investigators for the CCC and DCC are required to coordinate their submissions, reflecting the expectation that these two centers function as an integrated system. The emphasis is on building and running a multi-site network and establishing common procedures, not on pursuing stand-alone, hypothesis-driven research studies. In fact, individual hypothesis-driven studies are explicitly not a component of this announcement; the focus is the shared platform that future studies can use.

The Clinical Coordinating Center is envisioned as the operational hub for participant-facing work and biospecimen collection across multiple clinical sites. The CCC is responsible for identifying and managing those participating clinical sites, overseeing recruitment and enrollment, and ensuring consistent execution of study procedures. A key deliverable is enrollment of a core cohort consisting of newly diagnosed PD patients and matched control participants. The CCC must ensure high-quality, accurate collection of clinical data and biological specimens, using standardized approaches so that samples and data are comparable across sites and over time. In practice, this implies strong capabilities in protocol implementation, staff training and certification, participant recruitment and retention, regulatory compliance, specimen handling and shipping logistics, and ongoing monitoring to keep data and specimen quality high across the network.

The Data Coordinating Center provides the informatics and data stewardship backbone for PD BIN. The DCC is expected to manage standardized data acquisition and harmonization, implement rigorous quality control procedures, and support secure storage, analysis-ready curation, and long-term preservation of the datasets. A major requirement is dissemination and public accessibility: the network is expected to produce a broadly usable community resource, so the DCC must enable sharing in ways that protect participants while still maximizing scientific utility. That includes developing data dictionaries and common data elements, establishing workflows for data submission and validation from all sites, maintaining documentation and metadata so external users can interpret the resource correctly, and supporting mechanisms for data release and access consistent with NIH expectations for transparency and reuse.

A defining feature of the program is that both the CCC and DCC must be flexible enough to support future add-on projects that build on the core PD BIN cohort and dataset. Those later studies may seek to use the existing data and biospecimens, add new measures, or expand the cohort in targeted ways. The coordinating centers are therefore expected to design governance, operations, and technical systems that can accommodate new protocols, new assay types, evolving biomarker technologies, and additional clinical sites as the network grows. This forward-looking design is central to the FOA: the infrastructure should not be optimized only for a single fixed study, but for a sustained, extensible biomarker pipeline.

Another major expectation is that the biospecimens and data generated through PD BIN will be made into a publicly available resource for biomarker validation and discovery. That means the outputs are not only internal deliverables to NINDS, but community-facing assets intended to accelerate progress across academia, industry, and other stakeholders. The CCC and DCC are jointly expected to advance the overarching scientific objective of identifying and validating PD biomarkers by ensuring the resource is credible, standardized, well-documented, and broadly usable for replication, comparison across studies, and downstream qualification efforts.

In terms of administrative details, this is a discretionary funding opportunity using the U01 cooperative agreement mechanism, in the health category, under CFDA 93.853 (Extramural Research Programs in the Neurosciences and Neurological Disorders). It does not require cost sharing or matching. The announcement was posted September 24, 2010, with an original and current closing date of January 18, 2011, and an archive date of February 18, 2011. Eligibility is broad and includes public and private institutions of higher education, nonprofit organizations (including 501(c)(3) and certain non-501(c)(3) entities), for-profit organizations (including small businesses and other than small businesses), state, county, city or township governments, special district governments, public housing authorities, independent school districts, tribal governments and tribal organizations, U.S. territories or possessions, faith-based or community-based organizations, and certain designated institution types such as HBCUs, Hispanic-serving institutions, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian serving institutions, and tribally controlled colleges and universities. The FOA also indicates eligibility can extend to non-U.S. (foreign) entities and regional organizations, as described in the eligibility clarification.

Overall, the opportunity is best understood as an NIH-funded build-out of a national PD biomarker infrastructure: the CCC runs the clinical network and specimen pipeline, the DCC builds the data platform and public access pathway, and together they create a standardized, expandable, multi-site resource centered on newly diagnosed PD patients and matched controls. The intended payoff is a high-quality, publicly accessible dataset and biospecimen collection that the broader research community can use to discover, replicate, and validate biomarkers that ultimately support disease-modifying therapeutic development.

Browse more opportunities from the same agency: National Institutes of Health

Browse more opportunities from the same category: Health

Next opportunity: Proliferation Detection Research

Previous opportunity: Scalable Nanomanufacturing

USGrants.org Applicant Portal:

Are you interested in learning about about how to apply for this government funding opportunity? You can create a free applicant account and receive instant access to our applicant portal that many business owners like you have benefited from.

Apply for RFA NS 11 005

 

[Watch] how do funding administrators access proposals?

Applicants also applied for:

Applicants who have applied for this opportunity (RFA NS 11 005) also looked into and applied for these:

 

Grant application guides and resources

It is always free to apply for government grants. However the process may be very complex depending on the funding opportunity you are applying for. Let us help you!

Apply for Grants

 

 

Premium leads for funding administrators, grant writers, and loan issuers

Thousands of people visit our website for their funding needs every day. When a user creates a grant proposal and files for submission, we pass the information on to funding administrators, grant writers, and government loan issuers.

If you manage government grant programs, provide grant writing services, or issue personal or government loans, we can help you reach your audience.

Subscribe to Leads

 

Request more information:

Would you like to learn more about this funding opportunity, similar opportunities to "RFA NS 11 005", eligibility, application service, and/or application tips? Submit an inquiry below:

Don't forget to subscribe to our grant alerts mailing list to receive weekly alerts on new and updated grant funding opportunities like this one in your email.