DoD Lung Cancer, Translational Research Partnership Award | W81XWH 19 LCRP TRPA

Opportunity Information: Apply for W81XWH 19 LCRP TRPA

The DoD Lung Cancer Research Program (LCRP) Translational Research Partnership Award (TRPA) is a FY19 funding opportunity from the Department of Defense (DoD), administered through the U.S. Army Medical Research Acquisition Activity (USAMRAA), designed to push promising lung cancer discoveries toward real clinical use. The core purpose is to speed up translation by requiring a true partnership between two independent, faculty-level (or equivalent) investigators who bring different but complementary expertise to the same central lung cancer problem. One investigator must be a research scientist and the other must be a clinician, and the project has to be set up in a way that the collaboration is essential, meaning the work would be harder to accomplish, slower, or less impactful if the two investigators pursued it separately.

A major theme of this award is that the partnership must be intellectually balanced and genuinely collaborative. The announcement emphasizes that both partners should have equal intellectual input into the project design, with clear evidence that the clinician is not simply a source of patient access, specimens, or clinical logistics. Proposals where the clinical partner mainly provides tissue samples or recruits patients without shaping the scientific direction do not meet the intent. At least one member of the pair must already have relevant experience in lung cancer, either through research or direct patient care, so that the team is grounded in the disease context and the clinical realities of lung cancer diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes.

The DoD strongly encourages, but does not strictly require, that one partner be an active duty Service member or a Federal employee working in a DoD military treatment facility or laboratory, or affiliated with a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical center or research laboratory. This preference reflects the program goal of building translational capacity within military and VA health and research systems while still allowing participation from a broad range of institutions. Multi-institutional partnerships are encouraged as well, though they are not mandatory, and applicants are expected to demonstrate how the collaboration will operate across organizational boundaries if more than one institution is involved.

In terms of science scope, the TRPA is meant to support translational research rather than purely basic discovery or purely clinical service activities. The program recognizes that ideas can start in multiple places, including laboratory findings, population-based or epidemiologic observations, or insights that come directly from a clinician's experience treating patients and noticing patterns in outcomes or responses. Importantly, it frames translational research as a two-way exchange rather than a one-direction pipeline from bench to bedside. The research plan is expected to show a reciprocal flow of information between basic and clinical work, so that clinical observations refine lab experiments and lab results, in turn, inform clinical strategy.

The types of projects envisioned span a broad middle-to-late translational range. Examples include studies that advance in-vitro and/or animal model findings into work with human samples or patient cohorts, as well as late-stage preclinical efforts specifically aimed at preparing for clinical testing, such as work that supports an Investigational New Drug (IND) application. The mechanism also allows for pilot or proof-of-principle clinical trials, but if a project involves a regulated drug or device, the application must include documentation that an IND or Investigational Device Exemption (IDE) already exists, when applicable. In addition, the award supports correlative studies tied to clinical trials that are open, ongoing, or completed, including work that develops or validates endpoints that can strengthen future trials (for example, biomarkers, response measures, or clinically meaningful outcome metrics).

Because the award is built around partnership performance, the application must spell out how the two Principal Investigators (PIs) and any participating institutions will work together in practice. This includes concrete plans for communication, coordination of research activities, tracking progress and sharing results, and the logistics of data transfer. For multi-institutional projects, the opportunity adds an additional requirement: an intellectual property plan that anticipates and resolves potential intellectual and material property issues. The goal of that plan is to remove institutional barriers that can slow down collaboration, limit data or material sharing, or create disputes that would threaten timely completion of the project.

Administratively, this opportunity is categorized as discretionary federal funding in science and technology/research and development, using either a grant or cooperative agreement funding instrument. The opportunity number is W81XWH 19 LCRP TRPA, associated with CFDA 12.420, and eligibility is described as unrestricted (open to any type of entity), subject to any additional eligibility clarifications in the full announcement. The opportunity was posted March 22, 2019, with an original closing date of August 21, 2019, and it anticipated making about two awards. The listing shows an award ceiling of 0, which typically signals that applicants need to rely on the detailed announcement for budget caps or limits rather than assuming a fixed maximum from the summary line.

• The Department of Defense, Dept. of the Army -- USAMRAA in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "DoD Lung Cancer, Translational Research Partnership Award" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 12.420.
• This funding opportunity was created on Mar 22, 2019.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Aug 21, 2019. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 2 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Unrestricted (i.e., open to any type of entity above), subject to any clarification in text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility.

Apply for W81XWH 19 LCRP TRPA

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