Limited Competition: Coordinating Center (CC) for the Small Cell Lung Cancer (SCLC) Consortium (U24 Clinical Trial Not Allowed) | PAR 21 346

Opportunity Information: Apply for PAR 21 346

This NIH funding opportunity (PAR-21-346) is a limited competition cooperative agreement (U24; clinical trials not allowed) to continue support for the Coordinating Center for the Small Cell Lung Cancer (SCLC) Consortium. The overall goal is to keep the Consortium functioning as a coordinated, shared-resource network focused on SCLC prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and understanding how treatment resistance develops. Rather than funding a stand-alone research project, the award is meant to fund the infrastructure and centralized services that allow multiple Consortium research groups to work from common data standards, shared biospecimens, shared model systems, and consistent analytic approaches.

The Coordinating Center is expected to run the day-to-day and strategic administrative operations of the Consortium. That includes organizing governance and consortium activities, coordinating communications across member sites, and supporting meetings and other routine collaborative processes. In practice, this is the hub that keeps participating projects aligned, ensures policies are followed consistently, and helps the Consortium operate as a single program rather than a set of disconnected labs.

A major technical responsibility is the creation and ongoing support of databases for omics and other Consortium-relevant data. The Coordinating Center is expected to set up and maintain data systems that can accept, curate, harmonize, and distribute data generated across member groups. This implies developing common data elements, metadata standards, quality control checks, secure access and sharing workflows, and the ability to integrate diverse data types. The emphasis on omics suggests the data environment should be able to handle large-scale molecular datasets alongside clinical, pathological, and experimental annotations as applicable to the Consortium.

The opportunity also calls for centralized tissue banking and a virtual biospecimen database. The Coordinating Center should secure centralized banking for specimens submitted by Consortium members and maintain a virtual inventory that covers all tissue resources across the Consortium. This means the CC is responsible for tracking what biospecimens exist, where they are stored, what consent and use limitations apply, how they are annotated, and how members request and receive materials. The virtual biospecimen database is meant to make the Consortiums tissue assets discoverable and usable without forcing every study team to rebuild its own tracking system.

In addition, the Coordinating Center must provide centralized biostatistics, bioinformatics, and data analysis support. This role generally includes helping investigators design analyses, apply consistent statistical methods, develop pipelines for multi-omics integration, and perform cross-project analyses that become possible only when data are pooled. Centralizing these capabilities is intended to improve reproducibility, reduce duplication of effort, and make it easier to compare results across sites and studies.

The FOA also emphasizes creating and maintaining SCLC model repositories and distribution units for in vivo and in vitro models. The Coordinating Center is expected to establish shared repositories of Consortium-developed or Consortium-curated models (for example, cell lines, organoids, xenografts, genetically engineered mouse models, or related tools, depending on what the Consortium uses) and to manage distribution so other members can access them efficiently. This supports standardization and accelerates follow-up studies by ensuring that model systems can be replicated and shared across research groups.

On the coordination and outreach side, the Coordinating Center is expected to support meeting planning and communications among Consortium members and to create and maintain a Consortium website. The website typically serves as a central point for Consortium information, resources, policies, and potentially controlled-access portals for data and resource requests, depending on the structure approved by NIH and Consortium leadership.

From an administrative standpoint, the funding instrument is a cooperative agreement, meaning NIH is expected to have substantial programmatic involvement compared with a standard grant. The activity category is listed under Education and Health, and the CFDA numbers are 93.393 and 93.394. The opportunity lists an award ceiling of $940,000. The original closing date shown is 2021-11-17, and the FOA was created on 2021-09-29.

Eligibility is restricted because this is a limited competition. The listing includes small businesses as eligible applicants, but the FOA language also notes important limitations on non-U.S. participation: non-domestic (non-U.S.) entities are not eligible to apply, and non-domestic components of U.S. organizations are not eligible to apply. At the same time, foreign components, as defined in the NIH Grants Policy Statement, are allowed, meaning a U.S. applicant organization may include certain foreign collaborations or elements if they meet NIH policy requirements. The FOA directs applicants to review the full announcement for the detailed eligibility rules and definitions that govern those distinctions.

• The National Institutes of Health in the education, health sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Limited Competition: Coordinating Center (CC) for the Small Cell Lung Cancer (SCLC) Consortium (U24 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): 93.393, 93.394.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2021-09-29.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2021-11-17. (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 $940,000.00 in funding.
• Eligible applicants include: Small businesses.

Apply for PAR 21 346

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