Opportunity Has Closed
Letter of Intent Due May 17, 2023
The ALS Association’s Prevention Grants support efforts to prevent or delay the harms of ALS, emphasizing validation and translation over discovery.
Overview
The ALS Association is the largest philanthropic funder of ALS research worldwide. Our goal is to make ALS livable for everyone, everywhere, until we can cure it. To truly make ALS a livable disease, advancing the science of prevention is critical. Specifically, by 2030, when someone is diagnosed with ALS, we would like to be able to offer advice to their families about how to reduce their risk of developing the disease.
Achieving this ambitious goal requires a large body of knowledge, including an understanding of the causes and risk factors for ALS, methods for predicting when the clinical manifestations of ALS will emerge, and viable strategies to intervene, either by mitigating risk or by treating the underlying biology of disease before ALS symptoms emerge. The 2030 timeframe guides us to emphasize validation and translation over exploratory studies.
Prevention Grants provide up to $400,000 over 2 years to help advance translational science, interventions, and tools that could eventually prevent or delay the onset of ALS. Projects that will likely lead to human impact within the next 5–7 years will be given preference over longer term research.
To view the full funding announcement, click here.
Topics of Interest (Scope)
For this funding opportunity, we will accept applications from all scientific disciplines on topics that have the potential to ultimately prevent ALS. In addition to projects focused on ALS, projects that investigate the continuum of disease spanning ALS and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) are in scope.
We are especially interested in:
- Improved tools for demonstrating a causative role of environmental exposures in a scientifically rigorous manner that is less burdensome to people with ALS.
- Development of frameworks for determining the level of evidence required to translate knowledge of an environmental risk factor into a pharmaceutical, behavioral, or ecological intervention.
- Preclinical or clinical drug development aimed at preventing ALS, including efforts to treat prodromal syndromes such as mild motor impairment (MMI).
- Partnerships across FTD and other neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disease communities to mitigate ALS risk among different elevated-risk populations.
- New studies leveraging existing population-based cohorts to study environmental risk factors for ALS as well as MMI as a clinical syndrome that is prodromal to ALS.
- Infrastructure to enable study of those at elevated risk for ALS, including clinical cohorts and efforts designed to study potential interactions between genetic and environmental risk factors.
- Any other proposal with the potential to prevent the onset of ALS.
Please note: This funding opportunity will not support studies intended to identify new ALS-associated genes or new associations between ALS and environmental exposures.
Funding and Eligibility
Budgets for total costs up to $400,000 (inclusive of both direct and indirect costs) may be requested for a period of 2 years. Indirect costs are limited to 10% of total direct costs.
Individuals with the skills, knowledge, and resources necessary to carry out the proposed research may apply as a principal investigator. Individuals do not need to have a scientific background in ALS research. Established investigators, early career investigators, and investigators from outside the ALS field are all encouraged to apply. Junior postdoctoral fellows are not eligible to apply as principal investigators.
Key Dates and Deadlines
- Letter of Intent Due Date: May 17, 2023, 5 p.m. U.S. EDT
- Full Proposal Due Date (by invitation only): July 19, 2023, 5 p.m. U.S. EDT
- Anticipated Award Decision: September 2023
- Anticipated Earliest Start Date: October 2023
Our expectation is that contracting will be completed within 60 days of the award offer. If not, we reserve the right to rescind the award offer and redirect the funds to other projects.
Submissions
All application materials must be submitted electronically. To register for a Proposal Central account, create a new Letter of Intent or access an existing saved Letter of Intent, please visit proposalcentral.com.
Instructions for Proposal Central:
Questions
We encourage inquiries concerning this funding opportunity. Please submit your questions and other related correspondence to ResearchGrants@als.org.
