Call for Nominations: Research Innovation Awards (UK)

The programme aim is to invest in the most innovative research to accelerate knowledge and understanding of prostate cancer and develop better treatments and more effective approaches to diagnosis to transform the lives of all men with or at risk of prostate cancer.

They have identified three key areas where there are substantive gaps in their knowledge or expertise and they would welcome innovative research proposals targeted towards:

• Better Diagnosis: (including risk stratification and disease prognosis)
• Better Treatment: (for both localised & advanced disease, including improved prediction of which treatment(s) will be effective for an individual)
• Smarter Use of Data

Funding Information

• Their Research Innovation Awards support a broad range of proposals spanning their entire research strategy. Whilst this scheme typically supports research projects 3-4 years in duration, they do also welcome applications for smaller scale, yet highly innovative, pilot projects. Funding for projects of this type would usually be for up to 24 months, costing less than £100,000, with a focus of establishing proof of principle and/or generating novel data, whilst still being hypothesis-led research. Although such ‘blue skies’ research can be applied for with less supporting preliminary data, your total funding request should be proportionate to the extent and strength of your preliminary data.
• This scheme will fund both fundamental and clinical research (and all stages in between), and they expect proposals to have a focus on eventual benefit to men.
• Applicants will be expected to set out a logical and realistic project that has the potential to deliver that benefit to men.
• They will also consider applications that bring innovative ideas from other cancer types and other diseases to be tested or translated for prostate cancer, and they encourage applicants to build teams that include experts from other disciplines and other countries where that will improve the project.

Eligibility Criteria

• To apply to this call, the following criteria must also be met:
• Awards are available to established researchers working within a recognised academic or clinical institution in the UK. Applicants should have a strong track record in their field, and they welcome proposals from academics not currently working on prostate cancer (however, in such cases an expert from the prostate cancer research community should be named as a Joint-lead Applicant or CoApplicant on the proposal).
• Lead Applicants should hold tenured or tenure-track academic appointments, or for clinical applicants, they should hold an honorary academic contract at a recognised academic institution.
• Lecturers on fixed term contracts or post-doctoral researchers holding competitively awarded external fellowships can be Lead Applicants, as long as their contract extends at least 6 months beyond the duration of the project or the host institution has agreed to award a permanent position at the end of the fixed term.
• Individuals with greater than 5 years postdoctoral experience (for clinical researchers) or 10 years (for non-clinical researchers) can apply as independent Lead Applicant.
• Experienced Early Career Researchers who wish to apply as a Lead Applicant must have a senior academic (usually the research group head) named on the proposal as a Joint Lead Applicant.
  • They define an experienced Early Career Researcher as:
    • Non-clinical researcher: someone who has between 5-10 years post-doctoral experience.
    • Clinical researcher: someone who has 0-5 years post-doctoral experience.
• Experienced Early Career Researchers may include their salary within the application budget (if it’s not already covered through other means such as core institutional funds or fellowship funding). In this instance, they must truly be leading the research and spending a minimum of 80% FTE on the project. A detailed justification must be provided explaining how this salary support, and the research funding applied for, will support the individual in their career progression by achieving independence by the end of the project. If the individual secures a tenured position or fellowship funding then we expect their salary to be removed from the grant.
• Projects can include a period of research outside the UK where there is a CoApplicant or Collaborator based overseas. However, research must be conducted predominantly in the UK and they will not make any direct payments to non-UK institutions or pay invoices in any currency other than British pounds (GBP).

For more information, visit Prostate Cancer UK.