Registration Has Closed
Letter of Intent due August 25, 2022
The ALS Association’s Prevention Grants support efforts to prevent the onset of ALS. These grants emphasize validation and translation rather than discovery, with the goal of impacting clinical care by 2030.
Overview
One of the ALS Association’s goals is to prevent or delay the onset of ALS. Specifically, by 2030, at the latest, when someone is diagnosed with ALS, we would like to be able to offer some advice for their families on how to reduce their risk of developing ALS. 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 clinically manifest ALS emerges. This 2030 timeframe guides us to emphasize validation and translation rather than exploratory studies. These 2-year awards with a maximum budget of $400,000 seek to advance the translational science, interventions and tools that could eventually prevent or delay the onset of ALS.
To view the full funding announcement, click here.
Topics of Interest (Scope)
Examples of items that this funding opportunity will support include:
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 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 least burdensome to people with ALS
- Can include direct epidemiological methods, as well as other approaches including Mendelian randomization, epigenetic studies, animal models, etc.
- 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 prevention of 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 populations at elevated risk for ALS
- New studies leveraging existing population-based cohorts, to study both environmental risk factors for ALS, as well as MMI as a clinical syndrome that is prodromal to ALS
- Cohorts could include at-risk populations such as military veterans
- Formal recognition of MMI as a diagnostic entity could facilitate such studies
- 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
Funding and Eligibility
- The maximum period of performance is two years
- The maximum total budget is $400,000 (inclusive of both direct and indirect costs)
- Indirect costs are limited to 10 percent of the total direct costs
- All funds must be expended within the approved period of performance
Deadlines
- Letter of Intent Due Date: August 25, 2022, 5 p.m. US ET
- Full Proposal Due Date (by invite only): October 20, 2022, 5 p.m. US ET
- Anticipated Award Decision: December 2022
- Anticipated Earliest Start Date: December 2022 (**Note that start date must be before January 31, 2023)
Online Submission
To Register for a proposalCENTRAL account, create a new Letter of Intent or to access an existing saved Letter of Intent, please visit: https://proposalcentral.com/
User Guides for proposalCENTRAL:
Questions
We encourage inquiries concerning this funding opportunity and welcome the opportunity to answer questions from potential applicants. Submit general questions and other related correspondence to ResearchGrants@als.org.
