The purpose of the agreement is to offer one-year bridge funding (up to $100,000) for highly rated ovarian cancer research operating grant applications that are fundable but not funded in the September 2010 CIHR Operating Grants competition. The objective of these bridge operating grants is to fund promising research proposals or to ensure the maintenance of excellent research programs without loss of momentum, staff or trainees until the Principal Investigator has the opportunity to resubmit their research proposal. Applicants will be required to respond to the Operating Grant – Priority Announcement: Ovarian Cancer funding opportunity. When you are completing the Registration of your application through ResearchNet (deadline is August 16th), you will see an option under Tasks called “Apply to Priority Announcements”. Just click on the link and select “Ovarian Cancer” from the drop-down list of options.
The Ovarian Cancer Priority Announcement should be posted on the CIHR website within the next couple of days. After the grant applications are submitted (by Sept. 15), CIHR will identify those that have selected this Priority Announcement and send the lay abstracts/summaries to OCC to do a relevancy review - basically to ensure that the project does indeed have relevance to ovarian cancer. After the ranking by the CIHR grants panel(s) and determination of which grants will be funded by the regular competition, the remaining eligible (identified as being relevant by OCC, ranked as fundable but not funded by CIHR) applications will be considered for bridge funding. The two highest ranking applications will be selected by CIHR to receive the bridge operating grants.
Good luck to all of you applying to this competition! As always, OCC is open to suggestions from the ovarian cancer research community on how to fund research in a fair and competitive manner, so please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any ideas for future initiatives.