Grant Watch

NHMRC promotes ‘near miss’ applications We all know that only a fraction of fundable research receives a cut from the NHMRC’s finite funding pool. In fact, only 23 per cent of project grant applications received funding in 2011, with another 52 per cent worthy of funding, according to the agency. As such, the NHMRC is requesting that applications provide it with authority to pass the ‘near miss’ applications to other potential health and medical research funding bodies across the private and charitable sectors.

Partnership Projects round opens in April NHMRC Partnerships for Better Health – Projects (Partnership Projects) helps create partnerships among decision makers, policy makers, managers, clinicians and researchers. This funding scheme provides funding and support to create new opportunities for researchers and policy makers to not only work together to define research questions and undertake research, but also to interpret and implement the findings.

The next call for funding under the Partnership Projects initiative is expected to open in April 2012. The NHMRC is developing a rolling review process for Partnership Projects to allow more flexibility for submission of applications and better meet the needs of potential applicants and their partners. The NHMRC will release details of this process prior to the next call and communicate through RAO Alerts, Health and Research Tracker notifications.

$114.2 million investment in health and medical research In welcome news after the rumoured cuts to health and medical research earlier this year, the federal government announced in December a further $114.2 million investment in health and medical research, covering 159 grants. The grants were spread across three National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) funding schemes: Program Grants, Development Grants and Postgraduate Scholarships. This announcement brings the total NHMRC investment in health and medical research this year to $787.9 million and 1,299 research grants.

The 159 grants cover a broad range of research fields and will fund:

• 130 Postgraduate Scholarships in six states and territories worth more than $10 million;
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• 10 Program Grants, valued at over $94 million;
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• 16 Development Grants worth $7.5 million to support the commercial development of a product, process, procedure or service that can provide improved health care, disease prevention or provide health cost savings;
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• 3 Project Grants worth $1.7 million to support individuals and small teams of researchers.

Cure Cancer Australia Foundation Cure Cancer Australia Foundation (CCAF) is seeking applications for 2013 Project grants, worth $100,000 pa, with one- and two-year grants available. These grants will be awarded in any field of research, including basic laboratory, epidemiology, psychosocial, translational and clinical, into malignant disease, to provide start-up funding to support post-doctoral researchers with less than seven years post-doctoral or less than seven years post-MBBS experience at the time of application.

CCAF funds early-career researchers as sole chief investigator of their project, in order to advance their research and to increase their competitiveness for funding from other granting agencies in the future. The funding may be used for the applicant's own salary, or the salary of a research assistant, and/or research materials for the specified project.

Cure Cancer Australia Foundation has channelled close to $15 million of grants to over 400 researchers to date. Cure Cancer Australia Foundation offers this funding in partnership with Cancer Australia’s 2012 round of the Priority-driven Collaborative Cancer Research Scheme (PdCCRS). For more information about CCAF, go to www.curecancer.org.au. Applications for 2013 funding opened in mid-December and close 14 March 2012 at 5.00pm AEST.

Online grant finder updated Business owners can now search for government funding and support more easily following updates to the Grants & Assistance Finder tool on the federal government's small business website: business.gov.au. The updates include a new ‘Open to apply’ function, which displays all grants open for application, giving business owners a more targeted search. Businesses can also export their search results in a variety of formats to easily save their information.