28 September 2018, 4pm (Expressions of Interest) Full applications will be invited and assessed in March 2019
MRC Immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMIDs): understanding common mechanisms
Up to £1 million is available for awards of up to £200,000 (80% fEC value), for up to 24 months are available for exploratory or hypothesis-driven research that will systematically identify or explore common diseases mechanisms across multiple IMIDs.
The call aims to provide funds to support mechanistic studies using existing infrastructure and data sources including established cohorts, surveys, biobanks, and primary and secondary care data to:
- identify new mechanisms which are shared across multiple IMIDs
- evaluate the environmental impact on genetic predisposition to IMIDs
- investigate immunological tolerance within IMIDs
- explore the interplay between microbiota and IMIDs
- examine the organ specificity of some IMIDs.
They will consider applications that will contribute to building the evidence base for more focused research on specific types of IMIDs or will generate data to enable larger-scale experimental medicine and stratified medicine studies.
Awards are expected to help establish new and galvanise existing research collaborations between clinical and academic experts from different research fields.
The scope of the call includes, but is not limited to the following research topics:
- IMID clustering in defined population/patient groups
- addressing prevalence and changes in IMIDs during the life course (such as in childhood, during pregnancy or postpartum period)
- biomedical drivers of IMIDs
- shared mechanistic pathways in IMIDs
- IMID biomarkers, early predictors and genetic associations
- innovative methodological approaches, tools and technologies for capturing and measuring patients’ complexities in the context of IMIDs
- enriching data for established population and clinical cohorts.
Cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional teams are encouraged involving clinicians, epidemiologists, data scientists, social and behavioural scientists, and basic biomedical researchers to tackle the complexity of IMIDs at all levels.
Additionally, in order to build capacity in this area of research, applications from early-stage career researchers are particularly welcomed.
Queries re the remit of the call should be sent to imid@mrc.ukri.org
The EoI form is to be converted to pdf and submitted by email to martin.broadstock@headoffice.mrc.ac.uk