The Path to Large Scale Funding Opportunities
As life science research is becoming more complicated, requiring collaborative activity and significant resources, funding agencies, such as NIH and DOD, have shifted significant portions of their budgets towards supporting large scale, multi-project clinical activities of both academic institutions and companies. The funding agencies put forth great effort in creating and allocating budgets to programs and mechanisms that allow implementation of such scientific work. These include RFPs, U19s, grants and contracts solicited through Roadmap programs, and other opportunities, with fund proposals for over $5M. Such large scale solicitations fund advanced clinical trials, construction projects, product development, building centers of excellence, and more. In addition, in recent years, virtually all funding institutes within NIH allow for large scale projects to be submitted through the main unsolicited (investigator initiated) route, pending a brief institutional pre-approval process.
Being multi-project in nature, such applications require multidisciplinary collaborations with multiple laboratories and organizations, often bringing together academic and industry partners, and numerous commercial subcontractors. As such, creating an application can be a particularly daunting task, requiring a great deal of coordination between all partners, and skilled and experienced project management focus in order to integrate the scientific and technical sections for a single and coherent presentation. In addition, such large scale applications require submission of large and complex budgets for which detailed justifications must be added to complement the specific scientific and research plan presented. Lastly, these programs define very specific regulations that must be followed. The brief periods typically allotted between the dates of publication and submission add another source of pressure.
FreeMind’s team is particularly adept at large scale funding opportunities. We take it upon ourselves to devise a timeline for completion of the project, coordinate the specific tasks among all partners and collect all relevant scientific and technical sections in a timely manner. We ensure that all the components are integrated into a cohesive, focused, and competitive proposal. We follow the submission and post submission processes, and aid the clients in any negotiations that are necessary to get the award. Our expert consultants, analysts, managers and writers have extensive experience allowing them to identify the weakness, scientific or administrative, and strengthen them to produce a competitive and winning application.