MRC: Experimental Medicine Challenge Grants, May 2018

EMCG will fund studies which address the biggest gaps in our understanding of the causes and progression of human disease and which will produce major new mechanistic insights, with potential application to new therapeutic or diagnostic approaches and opportunities for “reverse translation” to basic research.

Applications should aim to produce major improvements in the understanding of human disease mechanisms, and must be:

• Challenge-led: As well as addressing “challenging” research questions, all proposals must involve an experimental intervention or “challenge” in humans, perturbing the system to explore disease mechanism. A challenge may be pharmacological, immunological, physiological, psychological, infectious etc.
• Human-focused: The focus should be on understanding human disease through experimental investigation in humans. While projects may include a small element of non-human work (if informed by or informing the work in humans), the focus of the project should be on human participants.
• Ambitious and innovative: Proposals should address important medical questions in new ways. Proposals should be sufficiently ambitious and demanding to warrant funding through this scheme rather than through standard research grant support. Proposals may use novel readouts or technologies.
• Experiment-driven: Proposals should be structured around an experiment designed to address a mechanistic question with a clear plan for establishing causal relationships and mechanisms. Proposals may include the use of drugs, other interventions or measures with established safety profiles in new settings/conditions. e.g. repurposing drugs as tool compounds to probe disease mechanism.
• Hypothesis-led/defining/refining: EM is more than hypothesis-free characterisation, and is more exploratory than hypothesis-testing confirmatory work. EM is more than just data collection: proposals may include, but should not solely focus on, deep characterisation/phenotyping of subjects.

The EMCG scheme will support a range of award scales, from smaller, focused, more exploratory and highly innovative projects (based e.g. on an intellectually sound hypothesis but perhaps lacking extensive pilot data), to large programmatic awards based on a more substantial platform of evidence.

The normal MRC eligibility rules apply.

For the full call text please visit the MRC grant call webpage.