WIKIMEDIA, NIKLAS BILDHAUERLast year, just one in five grant proposals sent to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) received funding. But thanks to a new pilot project launched at the beginning of the month by technology company Leidos Life Sciences, NIH grant applicants may have an easier way to reuse rejected proposals and find financing for their research elsewhere. The company outlined its project in a statement published yesterday (March 23) in Science Translational Medicine.
“The Online Partnership to Accelerate Research (OnPAR) program, operated by Leidos Life Sciences, will act as a matchmaker between unfunded NIH applicants and private research funders,” wrote Mike Lauer, the NIH’s deputy director for extramural research, in a blog post. “Not only will this program benefit our applicants by helping connect them with potential funders, it allows the private funders to take advantage of NIH’s peer review system and keeps applicants from having to develop another application to seek funding elsewhere.”
According to Leidos, NIH grant applicants who fail to receive funding, but have scored within the 30th percentile where percentiles are used (or simply “well” in other cases), will be invited to participate in the OnPAR program. NIH-submitted abstracts, uploaded to the OnPAR website ...
