Purpose.

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) issued by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH), solicits grant applications proposing exceptionally innovative, high risk, original and/or unconventional exploratory research projects focused on the inception

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and early stage development of highly innovative cancer-relevant technologies for biospecimen science.

The overall goal is to develop and evaluate technologies capable of interrogating and/or maximizing the quality and utility of biospecimens for molecular analyses with minimal invasiveness or compromise to donor/patient health.

This FOA will also support the development of tools, devices, instrumentation, and associated methods to assess sample quality, preserve/protect sample integrity, and establish verification criteria for quality assessment/quality control and handling under diverse conditions.

Projects must clearly demonstrate potential to produce a major impact in the area of biospecimen science.This funding opportunity is part of a broader NCI-sponsored Innovative Molecular Analysis Technologies (IMAT) Program.

Several IMAT FOAs of identical or closely related scientific scope using various funding mechanisms are available.

To facilitate selection, a separate Notice in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts provides brief cross-comparison and links to all the IMAT FOAs.

See NOT-CA-09-00 7.



Mechanism of Support.

This FOA will utilize the R21 grant mechanism and runs in parallel with a FOA of identical scientific scope, RFA-CA-09-005, that solicits applications under the NIH Exploratory/Developmental Phase II Research Grant (R33) award mechanism.