Research Answers to NCIs Provocative Questions Group C (R21) | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The funding opportunity titled "Research Answers to NCI's Provocative Questions - Group C (R21)" (Funding Opportunity Number RFA-CA-13-021) was a National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Cancer Institute (NCI) discretionary grant program aimed at pushing cancer researchers to tackle a curated set of underexplored, high-impact questions. The central idea behind the Provocative Questions initiative is that some important scientific problems in cancer research persist not because they are uninteresting, but because they are difficult, counterintuitive, or fall between traditional research silos. This FOA was designed to motivate fresh thinking and novel approaches to specific "problems and paradoxes" in cancer, framed explicitly as provocative questions, and to generate research answers that could unlock new directions for the field.

This particular announcement used the R21 mechanism, which is NIH's Exploratory/Developmental Grant format. In practical terms, that mechanism is commonly used to support early-stage, innovative, or high-risk projects where investigators may be testing a bold concept, building preliminary evidence for a new model, or developing an unconventional line of inquiry. The focus is less on having an already mature, fully proven research program and more on proposing an idea with strong rationale and potential for meaningful payoff if successful. Consistent with the R21 structure, the award ceiling listed for this FOA was $200,000, and the announcement specified that there was no cost sharing or matching requirement, meaning applicants were not required to contribute institutional or third-party funds as a condition of eligibility.

The scientific scope was broad across cancer research but anchored to NCI-defined priority questions rather than investigator-defined topic areas. The FOA emphasized that these provocative questions were not intended to represent the full set of NCI priorities in cancer research. Instead, they were meant to spotlight areas considered important yet historically insufficiently addressed. The goal, therefore, was to stimulate targeted innovation in specific domains where progress could be accelerated by encouraging researchers to directly confront unanswered paradoxes, gaps in understanding, or stubborn barriers to translation. The activity categories and associated CFDA numbers reflected the breadth of cancer-related work that could fit under this umbrella, including cancer cause and prevention research (93.393), cancer detection and diagnosis research (93.394), cancer treatment research (93.395), cancer biology research (93.396), and cancer control (93.399). Taken together, those categories indicate the FOA could support anything from mechanistic biology to intervention concepts, diagnostic strategies, and population-level or health services-related cancer research, as long as it squarely engaged one of the specified provocative questions in Group C.

Eligibility for the program was intentionally expansive and included a wide range of organizational types. Eligible applicants listed in the source data included public and state-controlled institutions of higher education, private institutions of higher education, nonprofits both with and without 501(c)(3) status (with the caveat noted in the listing), for-profit organizations other than small businesses, and small businesses. A variety of government entities were also eligible, including state governments, county governments, city or township governments, special district governments, independent school districts, and public housing authorities or Indian housing authorities. The FOA also allowed applications from Native American tribal governments (both federally recognized and other-than-federally recognized) and Native American tribal organizations. Beyond these standard categories, the announcement explicitly noted additional eligible applicants 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), along with faith-based or community-based organizations and eligible federal agencies. Importantly, the eligibility language also included non-U.S. entities: non-domestic (non-U.S.) organizations and institutions could apply, non-domestic components of U.S. organizations were eligible, and foreign components as defined under NIH policy were allowed. That inclusion signals NCI's interest in drawing in global expertise and perspectives for these hard problems, recognizing that innovative answers may come from any geography or research ecosystem.

Administratively, the opportunity was posted and created on September 30, 2013, with an original and current closing date of June 20, 2014, and it was archived on July 21, 2014. In other words, this was a time-limited solicitation with a fixed submission window rather than an ongoing, continuously open mechanism. The opportunity category was discretionary, and the funding instrument type was a grant, consistent with NIH's standard competitive peer-reviewed research funding model. While the summary provided here does not include review criteria or application structure details, the intent and framing strongly imply that applications were expected to be especially responsive to the stated provocative questions and to propose genuinely innovative approaches rather than incremental extensions of well-trodden lines of work.

Overall, this FOA can be understood as a targeted push by NCI to catalyze exploratory, potentially high-risk cancer research that directly addresses specific, carefully selected scientific puzzles. By pairing the Provocative Questions concept with the R21 exploratory grant format and a wide eligibility net that included domestic and international applicants across academic, nonprofit, governmental, and commercial sectors, the program was set up to attract unconventional ideas and new combinations of expertise. The underlying message was that some cancer research bottlenecks persist because they have not been framed sharply enough, pursued creatively enough, or prioritized enough, and that focused investments in answering these pointed questions could open up new scientific and clinical opportunities.

For further details, the source announcement was hosted by NIH at: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-CA-13-021.html, and the listed support contact for access or linking issues was the NIH Office of Extramural Research (OER) Webmaster at FBOWebmaster@OD.NIH.GOV.

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