Limited Competition: Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Bioinformatics Center (U24 Clinical Trial Not Allowed) | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The funding opportunity titled "Limited Competition: Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Bioinformatics Center (U24 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)" (RFA-RM-23-020) is a National Institutes of Health (NIH) cooperative agreement focused on building and operating a central Bioinformatics Center for the Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium (MoTrPAC). MoTrPAC is a large, multi-site effort supported through the NIH Common Fund that aims to understand how physical activity produces molecular changes across tissues and organ systems. This specific award supports the informatics and data-science backbone of the consortium rather than supporting clinical trials, which are explicitly not allowed under this FOA.

At its core, the Bioinformatics Center is expected to create and maintain a robust database environment and an integrated set of computational tools that can handle the wide range of data types generated across the MoTrPAC program. That includes clinical, physiological, metabolic, and other human study measures, alongside high-dimensional molecular profiling data produced through metabolomics, proteomics, genomics, transcriptomics, and related "omics" platforms. The intent is not simply to store files, but to enable true integration of heterogeneous datasets so researchers can connect molecular readouts with clinical and physiological endpoints and explore how those relationships change with physical activity.

A major emphasis of the opportunity is standardization and interoperability. The Bioinformatics Center is responsible for coordinating the implementation of data standards and ontology-based metadata standards across consortium contributors, which is crucial when many sites and laboratories generate data using different instruments, protocols, and naming conventions. By applying consistent metadata models and controlled vocabularies, the Center helps ensure that datasets can be compared, combined, queried, and reused without extensive manual cleanup. This work typically includes enforcing data dictionaries, harmonizing sample and subject identifiers, tracking experimental and analytical provenance, and ensuring that data submissions meet pre-defined quality and completeness requirements.

Beyond data ingestion and standardization, the Bioinformatics Center is expected to provide analysis, visualization, and access capabilities at a scale appropriate for modern multi-omics programs. The FOA highlights tools for analysis and visualization, implying that the Center should offer user-facing and programmatic ways to explore datasets, run common pipelines, generate integrated summaries, and support consortium-wide interpretation. It also emphasizes rapid access through cloud-based computing, which suggests a design that minimizes bottlenecks associated with downloading large datasets and instead supports bringing compute to the data. In practice, this can mean hosted workspaces, scalable compute resources for large reprocessing jobs, shared notebooks or workflow systems, and controlled-access mechanisms that align with NIH expectations for human data governance.

Another key role described in the FOA is leadership in cross-consortium data analysis. The Bioinformatics Center is not positioned as a passive repository; it is expected to actively lead analysis of the diverse datasets submitted by other MoTrPAC elements. That typically involves integrating multi-site, multi-assay datasets, developing consortium-wide analytic approaches, producing combined releases that are ready for broad scientific use, and helping drive discovery by identifying patterns and relationships that only become visible when data are analyzed together. The cooperative agreement mechanism underscores that NIH and the consortium will likely have substantial programmatic involvement, with coordinated milestones, shared decision-making, and ongoing collaboration rather than a hands-off grant structure.

This is a limited competition opportunity, meaning eligibility is restricted in ways defined in the full Notice of Funding Opportunity, and applicants should expect that only a small set of entities are permitted to apply. The posting also notes additional eligible applicants and specifically points out that non-domestic (non-U.S.) entities are not eligible, non-domestic components of U.S. organizations are not eligible, and foreign components (as defined by the NIH Grants Policy Statement) are not allowed. In other words, the funded activity must be conducted within allowable U.S.-based organizational structures, and applicants cannot rely on foreign components to carry out proposed work under this award.

Administratively, the opportunity is categorized as discretionary funding with a cooperative agreement funding instrument, in the health activity area, under CFDA number 93.310. The original closing date listed is July 24, 2023, and the award ceiling shown is $1,500,000. The opportunity was created on May 2, 2023. The listing also indicates "EligibleApplicants: Small businesses," although limited competition terms and the full FOA language control who can actually apply and under what circumstances, so applicants would need to verify their eligibility against the complete notice.

Overall, the opportunity is aimed at establishing the centralized bioinformatics infrastructure that makes MoTrPAC data usable at consortium scale: a secure, standards-driven, cloud-enabled platform that supports ingestion, harmonization, storage, sharing, analysis, and visualization of deeply complex clinical and multi-omics datasets, while also providing scientific leadership in integrative data analysis across the entire program.

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