National Cooperative Reprogrammed Cell Research Groups (NCRCRG) to Study Mental Illness (U19)

archived

The purpose of the National Cooperative Reprogrammed Cell Research Groups (NCRCRG) program is to create multidisciplinary research groups, in partnership with academia and industry, to use patient-derived reprogrammed cells to develop validated platforms for identifying novel targets and developing new therapeutics or diagnostic tools to reduce the burden of mental illness. The collaborations will be pre-competitive, meaning that they lie at the interface between basic academic research and proprietary industrial research and involve cooperation between groups that might otherwise be competitors, with a focus on optimizing tools and measures needed for successful translational research. The Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) encourages applications to further develop promising cellular differentiation/characterization protocols and/or disease-relevant assays using patient-derived reprogrammed cells (e.g., induced pluripotent stem cells or iPSCs, induced neuronal cells or iNCs). Critical features of these applications should be (1) a strong emphasis on developing methodology that is robust and replicable across several performance sites, and (2) cross-paradigm validation to yield predictive value for pathophysiology.

High