Paul D. Wellstone Muscular Dystrophy Cooperative Research Centers (U54)

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Purpose. This funding opportunity announcement (FOA) solicits new (type 1) and competitive renewal (type 2) applications for the support of Paul D. Wellstone Muscular Dystrophy Cooperative Research Centers (MDCRCs). Successful applicants will join a network of existing Centers to foster the translation of new scientific findings and technological developments into novel treatments for the muscular dystrophies. Each Center may contain a mixture of basic, translational, or clinical research, as long as efforts are directed toward the steps required for therapeutic development, including therapeutic target identification, characterization, and validation, development of diagnostics and biomarkers to characterize or stratify patient populations, in vitro assay development, animal model development and characterization, candidate therapeutic efficacy screening, preclinical therapeutic optimization and FDA-required activities leading to an investigational new drug (IND) application, clinical infrastructure and studies in support of a clinical trial, patient-oriented natural history studies, and early stage clinical trials for one or more types of muscular dystrophy. Applicants should propose multi-disciplinary and collaborative studies that address one or more gaps in the therapeutic development pipeline for muscular dystrophy. Research problems should require substantial collaborative efforts to solve, and thus are best carried out in a center setting. Mechanism of Support. This FOA will utilize the U54 Specialized Centers Cooperative Agreement grant mechanism.

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