NINDS IGNITE - Innovation Grants to Nurture Initial Translational Efforts

NINDS launched in December 2014 a new suite of early-stage therapy development funding programs, called The Innovation Grants to Nurture Initial Translational Efforts (IGNITE). IGNITE is meant to serve a feeder program to the later-stage therapy development programs that NINDS launched in July 2014, namely the Cooperate Research to Enable and Advance Translational Enterprises (CREATE) and Blueprint Neurotherapeutics (BPN) Programs.


The IGNITE suite will have four funding opportunities. The first two funding opportunities, released in December 2014 are: (1) Assay Development and Therapeutic Agent Identification and Characterization to Support Therapeutic Discovery (R21/R33) (PAR-15-070), which focuses on supporting the development of new in vitro and ex vivo assays and iterative screening efforts to identify and characterize novel therapeutic agents for neurological disorders; (2) Pharmacodynamics and In vivo Efficacy Studies for Small Molecules and Biologics/Biotechnology Products (R21/R33) (PAR-15-071), which supports the implementation of pharmacodynamics (PD), pharmacokinetics (PK), and in vivo efficacy studies to demonstrate that proposed therapeutic agents are appropriately chosen for further development as a treatment of a neurological disorder. The two additional IGNITE programs slated for release later on in 2015 will focus respectively on (a) funding validation of translatable animal models and quantifiable markers of target engagement applicable in humans and (b) neuroscience-focused translational platform technology development that enables and accelerates drug discovery for neurological disorders (e.g., overcoming blood-brain barrier impermeability).