Letters of intent due January 8, 2025

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The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences’ (NCATS) Clinical & Translational Science Award (CTSA) program seeks to develop and implement innovative solutions that will improve the efficiency, quality, and impact of the process for turning observations in the laboratory, clinic, and community into interventions that improve the health of individuals and communities. The CTSA program supports a national network of medical research institutions that work together to speed the translation of research discovery into improved patient care.

Eight CTSA institutions have joined together to form the Consortium of Rural States (CORES): The University of Utah Health, the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, Frontiers Clinical and Translational Science Institute, University of Kentucky, the Translational Research Institute at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, the University of Iowa, Dartmouth College, and Penn State University.

The purpose of this request for applications (RFA) is to promote multi-institutional collaboration across the CTSA consortium by funding innovative translational science research projects that involve two or more of these eight CTSA CORES institutions. This pilot program is soliciting applications from faculty members at all career levels for translational science pilot projects that will exemplify the CTSA mission of “understanding a scientific or operational principle underlying a step of the translational process with the goal of developing generalizable principles to accelerate translational research.” 

The CORES Multi-Institutional Pilot Program will fund translational science projects aiming to identify and overcome barriers to the performance of translational research. Pilots should articulate a clear translational research barrier(s) and propose an innovative plan to overcome or ameliorate the barrier (i.e., a translational science innovation). The proposed innovations should be broadly generalizable to many different translational research questions, and not specific to any one project or disease.
 

Proposed projects should align with one of the following project scopes: 

• Develop: New methodology, technology, tool, resource, or training paradigm that has generalizable application to an identified translational roadblock 

• Demonstrate: New methodology, technology, tool, resource, or training paradigm to improve the effectiveness or  efficiency of the translational process (including feasibility to support future clinical or translational science or research projects) 
• Disseminate: Tools to effectively promote methodology, technology, tool, resource, or training paradigm that  overcome an identified translational roadblock or improve the effectiveness or efficiency of the translational process into broader use

Areas of Emphasis

In accordance with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) strategic plan and its commitment to increasing representation in research, funding emphasis for this RFA will be given to translational science proposals that address one of the following: 

• Climate Change and Environmental Health
• Health Equity:  For example, pediatric populations, older adults, people with disabilities and/or rare disorders, underrepresented racial/ethnic and/or sexual and gender minorities, rural populations or populations with low socio-economic status.
• Rural Health
• Maternal Health