Nominations open for Targeted Call Research Awards 2025 (UK)

Priority Areas

• The priorities they are interested in are:
  • JLA Priority 2: What are the optimal markers/combinations of markers (clinical, endoscopic, imaging, genetics, other biomarkers) for stratification of patients with regards to disease course and monitoring disease activity and treatment response?
  • JLA Priority 5: What is an optimal treatment strategy for perianal Crohn’s Disease and what individual factors determine this?
  • JLA Priority 6: What is the best treatment for controlling diarrhoea and/or incontinence symptoms in people with IBD, including novel pharmacological and non-pharmacological options? Is high-dose Loperamide safe and effective in the treatment of diarrhoea in IBD?
  • JLA Priority 8: What is the association between IBD and fatigue and how should it be managed?
  • JLA Priority 9: Does early surgery or later surgery for terminal ileal Crohn’s disease result in better outcomes (quality of life, cost-effectiveness)?

Funding Information

• Funding for any one project will not exceed £150,000 in total over a maximum period of three years.

Costs Covered

• Crohn’s & Colitis UK Research Awards can cover direct costs of the research. This includes costs of materials, laboratory services, expenses and staff specifically employed in the research, including PhD stipends and fees. Any salary costs for the Principal Investigator, or other directly allocated salary costs, must be fully justified within the application.
• You can apply for funds to cover the cost of purchasing equipment (but not costs associated with maintenance of equipment) on the grant, but these must be specific to the project. They will not, for example, cover the costs of generic lab equipment such as fridges or freezers unless required specifically for the purposes of the project being applied for – this must be clearly justified in the grant application. In addition, they will not consider grants where the item of equipment represents a significant portion of the grant costs. Budget requests must be fully justified in the full application.
• You may include any consumables and laboratory materials directly attributable to the project including animal costs and access charges to shared equipment facilities (e.g. microscopes, flow cytometers, mass spectrometers). You can also include costs for consultancy and statistician advice.

Ineligible Costs

• The Charity will not pay for:
  • Estates costs
  • Equipment maintenance or running costs.
  • Staff recruitment costs
  • Standard office equipment (e.g. laptops, printers etc.)
  • Apprenticeship levy
  • Organisational overheads (e.g. rent, heating, administrative support etc.) and other indirect costs

Eligibility Criteria

• Applicants must be based at a UK-based university, research institute or NHS setting. They cannot accept applications from commercial organisations at this time.
• Please note that whilst they would consider funding studies involving international collaboration, the Principal Investigator and Host Institution must be based in the UK.

Assessment Criteria

• There are both scientific/clinical reviewers on the panel and lived experience reviewers. They have different roles on the panel and will assess your outline application accordingly.
• They expect all applicants to have considered patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) and equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in their proposed work. Any involvement should be proportionate to the type of study being proposed. For example they would expect a laboratory-based study to have less involvement overall than a clinical study that will be recruiting patients. They expect all studies, however, to have consulted people living with the condition.
• Applications that fail to embed PPIE and EDI adequately in the proposed work will not be shortlisted and invited to submit a full application, irrespective of the strength of the rest of the application.

For more information, visit Crohn’s & Colitis UK.