High-Throughput Screening (HTS) Platform for Discovery of Medications to Treat Alcohol Use Disorder (R43/R44 Clinical Trials Not Allowed) | RFA AA 24 001

Opportunity Information: Apply for RFA AA 24 001

The High-Throughput Screening (HTS) Platform for Discovery of Medications to Treat Alcohol Use Disorder funding opportunity (RFA-AA-24-001) is an NIH Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant that focuses on building better screening tools to speed up medication discovery for alcohol use disorder (AUD). The aim is not to fund clinical testing in people, but to support small businesses in creating or improving laboratory platforms that can rapidly evaluate many candidate compounds and identify which ones look promising for treating AUD.

This NOFO supports work on either a brand-new HTS platform or the optimization of an existing one, as long as it is designed for in vivo and/or in vitro screening relevant to AUD. The opportunity is centered on assays that use small vertebrate model organisms (explicitly excluding rodents), invertebrate model organisms, and human cell- and tissue-based models. In practice, this means applicants can propose platforms based on systems like non-rodent vertebrate models, simpler organisms suited for scalable screening, and human-derived cellular or tissue models that can capture aspects of alcohol response in a way that is useful for drug discovery.

A key requirement is that the screening assays must be demonstrably sensitive to varying alcohol concentrations and also sensitive to treatment effects from tested compounds. In other words, the platform needs to show measurable, dose-responsive changes when alcohol levels change, and it must be able to detect when an intervention modifies those alcohol-related effects. Just as important, the outcome measures have to be accurate and reproducible, meaning the assay readouts should be consistent across runs and suitable to serve as reliable endpoints for comparing compounds. The overall emphasis is on practical screening performance: the model should generate quantitative outcome variables that can support high-throughput decision-making about which compounds advance.

Eligibility is limited to U.S. small business concerns, consistent with SBIR requirements. Foreign organizations are not eligible to apply, and non-U.S. components of U.S. organizations are also not eligible. However, a foreign component may be allowable in some cases as defined under the NIH Grants Policy Statement, which generally refers to specific project elements conducted outside the U.S. that are justified and permitted under NIH policy, rather than a primary non-U.S. applicant organization.

Administratively, the opportunity is a discretionary grant in the health funding category (CFDA 93.273) under the National Institutes of Health. The original closing date listed for applications was April 9, 2024, and the NOFO was created on December 21, 2023. Overall, the opportunity is designed to strengthen the early-stage pipeline for AUD therapeutics by improving the experimental screening infrastructure that can identify medication candidates more efficiently and with stronger biological relevance than many traditional approaches.

• The National Institutes of Health in the health sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "High-Throughput Screening (HTS) Platform for Discovery of Medications to Treat Alcohol Use Disorder (R43/R44 Clinical Trials Not Allowed)" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 93.273.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2023-12-21.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2024-04-09. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Eligible applicants include: Small businesses.

Apply for RFA AA 24 001

[Watch] Creating a grant proposal using the step-by-step wizard inside the applicant portal: