Call for European Research Projects on rare Diseases Driven by Young Investigators
On the 7th of December 2011 E-Rare opens its 4th Joint Transnational Call for Research Projects on Rare Diseases. Nine countries from the European Research Area are joining this call: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Israel, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Spain.
Please note that decision about the participation of the Turkish funding agency TUBITAK is still pending. The Call text will be updated as soon as their commitment to the call is confirmed.
The aim of the call is to provide young, independent investigators the opportuinity of building transnational collaborations in the field of rare disease research.
Projects shall involve a group of rare diseases or a single rare disease following the European definition i.e. a disease affecting not more that five in 10 000 persons in the European Community. Rare infectious diseases, rare cancers and rare adverse drug events in treatment of common diseases are excluded from the scope of this call.
The research proposals must cover at least one of the following areas, which are equal in relevance for this call:
- Collaborative research using patients databases and biobanks with clear potential for clinical/public health or socio-economic application
- Research on rare diseases including genetics, epigenetics and pathophysiological studies
- Research on development of applications for diagnosis and therapies for rare diseases
- Patient oriented research in the area of social and human sciences as well as health services research and health economy research in the field of rare diseases.
Interventional clinical trails are excluded from the scope of this call.
Only transnational projects will be funded - each consortium submitting a proposal must involve a minimum of three and a maximum of six research groups from at least three different countries participating in the call (see the list above). Research groups from countries whose funding organizations are not partner in this E-rare-2 call may participate in projects if they are able to secure their own funding. The duration of the projects can be up to 3 years.
All prinicipal investigators, including the coordinator of the consortium must be Young Investigators - that is, have been awarded their PhD/MD or equivalent of doctoral degree, at least 2 and up to 10 years prior pre-proposal submission deadline. Extensions to this period may be allowed in case of eligible career breaks and must be properly documented.
All steps of the submission procedure will be managed by the Joint Call Secretariat (JCS) 2012.
There will be two-stage submission procedure for joint applications: pre-proposals that must be submitted no later than 31 January 2012, 12:00 CET and joint full proposals that will be accepted only from applicants explicitly invited by JCS to submit them.
Researchers looking for partnerships can post their demands on E-Rare FORUM (see also the text below).
