Opportunity Information: Apply for RFA AI 21 020
The Early-Stage Development of Data Science Technologies for Infectious and Immune-mediated Diseases funding opportunity (RFA-AI-21-020) is a National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) solicitation that supports early-stage creation or major adaptation of data science tools that can move allergy, immune-mediated, and infectious-disease research forward. The central aim is to build enabling technologies that make it easier to acquire, manage, analyze, visualize, and share data and knowledge across a wide range of NIAID-relevant topics, including disease mechanisms, risk prediction, epidemiology, detection and diagnosis, and the development or evaluation of treatments and vaccines. The disease scope is intentionally broad and includes infectious diseases (including emerging infections) as well as immune-mediated conditions such as allergy, autoimmunity, and immune responses related to transplantation.
This announcement sits within NIAID's broader, trans-institute data science program and is specifically positioned at the "early-stage development" point on the tool-development pipeline. In practical terms, that means the FOA is geared toward projects that are still being prototyped or require significant engineering work to become more robust, usable, and adaptable for real research settings. It also explicitly covers substantial modifications of existing tools when those changes are needed to serve new scientific use cases in infectious or immune-mediated disease research. This is different from purely exploratory, higher-risk concept-testing efforts (often supported under R21 mechanisms) and different from later-stage activities that focus on scaling, long-term operations, broad community support, and sustained maintenance (often supported under U24 mechanisms). In other words, the focus here is on building and hardening the tool so it can credibly be used by others and form a foundation for later expansion and sustainment.
The funding mechanism is a U01 cooperative agreement, which signals that NIAID expects substantial scientific or programmatic involvement during the life of the award. Compared with a standard research grant, a cooperative agreement typically involves closer collaboration with NIH staff on milestones, deliverables, coordination, and progress monitoring, reflecting the applied and infrastructure-like nature of tool development. The FOA is labeled "Clinical Trial Not Allowed," meaning applicants should not propose studies that meet NIH's definition of a clinical trial; the work should remain focused on technology development and related non-clinical validation or demonstration activities rather than interventional human-subjects research designed to evaluate clinical outcomes.
In terms of funding scale and competitiveness, the opportunity listed an award ceiling of $300,000 and anticipated making around three awards. While the ceiling amount provides a sense of the maximum budget level NIH expects per award under this FOA, the key takeaway is that it is a relatively targeted, development-focused program designed to fund a small number of projects that can produce tangible, usable data science technologies relevant to NIAID's mission. The posted original closing date was July 6, 2023, and the FOA was created on March 17, 2021, which indicates it was an active solicitation during that period and may now be closed unless reissued or replaced.
Eligibility is broad and includes many organization types: state, county, and local governments; special districts; independent school districts; public and private institutions of higher education; federally recognized tribal governments and other tribal organizations; public housing authorities/Indian housing authorities; nonprofit organizations with or without 501(c)(3) status (excluding higher education when specified); for-profit organizations (other than small businesses); and small businesses, along with other categories as clarified in the FOA's eligibility text. This wide eligibility reflects the reality that impactful data science tooling may come from academic labs, research institutes, health departments, nonprofits, or private-sector teams with the engineering capacity to build and refine research software and data platforms.
Overall, this FOA is best read as a call for practical, enabling data science technologies that directly improve how researchers working on infectious and immune-mediated diseases handle data and turn it into actionable knowledge. Strong projects under this program would typically be expected to deliver concrete, testable outputs (for example, software, workflows, pipelines, data models, visualization systems, interoperability approaches, or dissemination mechanisms) that are not merely conceptual but are meaningfully developed toward robust use in the research community, consistent with the "prototyping to hardening and adaptation" emphasis.Apply for RFA AI 21 020
- The Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health in the health sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Early-Stage Development of Data Science Technologies for Infectious and Immune-mediated Diseases (U01 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)" and is now available to receive applicants.
- Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 93.855.
- This funding opportunity was created on Mar 17, 2021.
- Applicants must submit their applications by Jul 06, 2023. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
- Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $300,000.00 in funding.
- The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 3 candidate(s).
- Eligible applicants include: State governments, County governments, City or township governments, Special district governments, Independent school districts, Public and State controlled institutions of higher education, Native American tribal governments (Federally recognized), Public housing authorities/Indian housing authorities, Native American tribal organizations (other than Federally recognized tribal governments), Nonprofits having a 501(c)(3) status with the IRS, other than institutions of higher education, Nonprofits that do not have a 501(c)(3) status with the IRS, other than institutions of higher education, Private institutions of higher education, For profit organizations other than small businesses, Small businesses, Others (see text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility for clarification).
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