Consortium on Beta cell Death and Survival (HIRN CBDS) (UC4) | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The Consortium on Beta cell Death and Survival (HIRN CBDS) (UC4) funding opportunity (RFA-DK-14-021) is a National Institutes of Health (NIH) cooperative agreement designed to push forward technology development for studying human pancreatic tissue at very fine resolution. The central aim is to create and apply medium- to high-throughput omics platforms that can interrogate pancreatic cells at single-cell or near single-cell detail, so researchers can see what is happening inside individual cells or very small cell populations rather than averaging signals across whole tissues. In practice, this points toward approaches such as transcriptomics, epigenomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and other "omics" methods that are scaled for throughput while still preserving cellular resolution, especially in complex human pancreatic samples where beta cells are relatively rare and where disease processes can be patchy and heterogeneous.

Projects funded under this announcement are meant to plug directly into a larger team-science structure. Awardees become members of the Consortium on Beta cell Death and Survival (CBDS), which sits within the broader Human Islet Research Network (HIRN). The consortium's scientific mission is focused on Type 1 Diabetes (T1D), specifically the human biology of beta cell stress, dysfunction, and destruction. The long-term clinical motivation is to protect remaining beta cell mass as early as possible in the disease course, and ultimately to help prevent or slow the shift toward autoimmunity and progressive beta cell loss. The technology emphasis is important because many of the key events in early T1D are believed to occur in small subsets of cells and may be missed by bulk measurements; single-cell and near single-cell methods can capture rare cell states, stress responses, and cell-to-cell differences that could reveal mechanisms and intervention points.

Because this is a cooperative agreement (UC4) rather than a standard independent research grant, the expectation is that funded groups will coordinate closely with NIH and with other consortium investigators. Cooperative agreements typically involve substantial programmatic involvement from the funding institute, and they are commonly used when a program depends on collaboration, shared standards, common resources, and interoperable data or methods. For applicants, that usually translates into planning for consortium participation: aligning technology outputs with shared needs, contributing to cross-site comparisons or validation, and building tools that other researchers in the network can use on human pancreatic tissues.

From an administrative standpoint, the opportunity was posted on August 27, 2014, with an original and final application due date of March 3, 2015, and an archive date of April 3, 2015. The estimated total program funding listed is $8,000,000, and the award ceiling is $900,000. There is no cost sharing or matching requirement. The activity is listed under CFDA 93.847 (Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Diseases Extramural Research), consistent with NIH support through institutes focused on diabetes and related conditions.

Eligibility is broad and includes many kinds of organizations that can carry out biomedical research and technology development. Eligible applicants include public and state-controlled institutions of higher education, private institutions of higher education, nonprofit organizations (including those with and without 501(c)(3) status), small businesses, and for-profit organizations other than small businesses, along with a range of government entities (state, county, city or township, special district governments, independent school districts, and certain housing authorities). The eligibility section also explicitly names multiple institution types and community-serving categories such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-serving Institutions, Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities (TCCUs), Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian Serving Institutions, and Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs), as well as faith-based or community-based organizations and eligible federal agencies. Foreign organizations and foreign institutions are also eligible to apply, and foreign components are allowed as defined by the NIH Grants Policy Statement; however, non-U.S. components of U.S. organizations are not eligible under this FOA.

Overall, the opportunity is best understood as targeted support for building the next generation of omics technologies that can reliably profile human pancreatic tissues at cellular resolution and at a throughput level useful for systematic studies. By placing those technology teams inside CBDS and HIRN, NIH is signaling that the end goal is not just a one-off assay, but a coordinated set of tools and datasets that help the field uncover how and why human beta cells enter stressed states, how they die, and what molecular pathways might be manipulated to preserve beta cell mass and change the trajectory of Type 1 Diabetes. For applicants, success would depend on proposing an omics technology that is both innovative and practical for human pancreatic samples, and on showing a clear plan to operate within a consortium model where methods, data, and validation efforts can be shared and compared across sites.

For the full archived announcement and any detailed requirements that were specific to the 2014-2015 competition cycle, NIH provided the FOA link at: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-DK-14-021.html. If there were access or linking problems, the contact listed was the NIH Office of Extramural Research (OER) Webmaster at FBOWebmaster@OD.NIH.GOV.

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