The purpose of this funding opportunity announcement (FOA) is to encourage applications seeking to develop the next generation of brain stimulation devices for treating mental health disorders. Applications are encouraged that will either 1) develop novel brain stimulation devices or 2) significantly enhance, by means of hardware/software improvements, the effectiveness of brain stimulation devices that are currently U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved or cleared. Novel devices should move beyond existing electrical/magnetic stimulation and develop new stimulation techniques capable of increased spatiotemporal precision as well as multi-focal, closed-loop approaches. Applications seeking to develop new capabilities should focus on significant enhancement of the spatial resolution, depth of delivery, and/or precision of the device. Incremental changes to existing devices (e.g., software updates) are not within the scope of this announcement. Applications should be submitted by multi-disciplinary teams with diverse expertise including systems neuroscience, engineering, clinical, and regulatory affairs. Applications submitting in response to this FOA should promote the development or significant enhancement of novel tools (hardware/software) for brain stimulation in humans.Although the application should focus on the engineering development and bench top testing of the tool, animal and limited human testing necessary to demonstrate initial proof of concept is allowable.
Applications to this FOA are not expected to be hypothesis-driven, but should propose design-directed, developmental, or discovery-driven technology research using integrative approaches.
Although this funding opportunity uses the R01 grant mechanism, it runs in parallel with a program announcement of identical scientific scope, PAR-22-038, which uses the R21 grant mechanism.
Deadlines:
PAR-22-039 Expiration Date January 08, 2025
Due to the transdisciplinary nature of the projects and the focus on collaboration and expertise sharing, this FOA requires the applicants to comprise a transdisciplinary team of investigators with expertise from fields such as engineering, device development, regulatory, physical, mathematical, computational sciences, as well as neuroscience, neuropsychiatry, and other areas of the biological sciences.
