Enrichment-Program-001

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Overview. The Pilot and Feasibility Project (P/F) program is an important component of Core Center activities that facilitates and promotes GI research at JHU. The highest priority of our P/F program is to provide financial support, mentoring, and training to young investigators who have shown interest and significant promise in GI research. In addition, our P/F program supports highly innovative research of more established investigators who are not currently working in the GI field but are interested in applying their expertise to studies that answer important mechanistic questions related to digestive disorders. In agreement with the NIDDK guidelines, the P/F program can offer established GI investigators support to develop new areas of GI research, although we have not yet funded proposals in this category due to lack of compelling applications and our priority of funding young investigators. In the first 3 years of its existence, the P/F program has funded 11 applications; all of those were from junior investigators. In the fourth year, we selected for funding two applications from young investigators and two from more established investigators currently working in non-GI fields. Altogether, over the 4 years, the average success rate (funded/submitted) of applications is 25%, the applications from young investigators represent 82% of funded projects, and the applications from established investigators new to the field constitute 18% of funded projects. Our P/F program has significant outreach, attracting applicants and members from both clinical and basic science departments. About half of our awardees (54%) came from the Department of Medicine, another half (46%) – from the Departments of Cell Biology, Physiology, Pediatrics, Biophysics, Genetics, and Material Science and Engineering. Over three years, the P/F program invested $275,000 and yielded $2,410,000 of new funds from various sources, an 8.7 fold return on investment (calculated on one year funding, direct costs; considering 5 year funding, yield is $8,800,000, direct costs, a 32 fold return). In agreement with NIH guidelines, evaluation will also be done at 5 and 10 years after investment. Main Goals. Our broad Specific Aims remain the same as previously and follow the NIH guidelines for the P/F programs under the Silvio O. Conte Digestive Diseases Research Core Centers. Specifically, the P/F program will provide financial support to three categories of investigators, with highest priority for category 1: 1) Young and new investigators without current and prior NIH support (R01, U, or P grants) as Principal Investigators, who show interest and great promise in GI related research 2) Investigators, who have NIH funding (at the time of the awards or had such funding in the past), are established in other research disciplines, and have expertise that would move digestive disease research at JHU forward but have not previously taken part in GI research. The supported projects would test innovative tools and concepts in the experimental systems relevant to the digestive tract. 3) Investigators already working in digestive diseases, who propose to make a substantial change in the direction of their research. The P/F awards will support projects that aim to generate additional preliminary data necessary for full-size grant applications to the NIH (the R01 mechanism) as well as other funding agencies. Applications from new and establish investigators that test novel concepts, utilize innovative experimental systems or propose to carry the GI research at the interface of different disciplines will have significant support. In addition to financial assistance, the P/F program offers mentoring and guidance to recently appointed young investigators, as well as opportunity to showcase their research and test their ideas. Specific plans to achieve our goals. The main approaches to application solicitation, selection, and review will remain unchanged from our current P/F program, based on the success we have had with this program. Specifically, identification of P/F projects for funding will follow a 5-step process (outlined in detail in the application) including advertising, internal review for eligibility, evaluation of scientific merit by our External Scientific Advisory Committee (an independent external committee), final selection, and feedback to all (successful and non-successful) applicants. We will further streamline the application process and introduce a pre-application Q&A session (see below) to familiarize the potential applicants with the guidelines as well as review process. We will also continue our program of regular evaluations, as well as encouraging wider dissemination of the P/F results. A newly begun feature of the P/F program involves a brief introductory presentation of the P/F by new awardees at Work-in-Progress at the beginning of the academic year and summary reports by past awardees ending each academic year. We will also enhance current mentoring of young trainees. We will continue to encourage applications from this group for larger NIH R01-type grants; however, a new feature of our P/F program is to advise the applicants to send their grants for initial evaluation and feedback to a recently established JHU “Experts panel” composed of senior scientists with significant expertise in grant writing/reviewing.