This Notice of Special Interest (NOSI) is to support projects that use data, alone or in combination, to address scientific questions and knowledge gaps in basic or clinical research in immune-mediated and infectious diseases.

NIAID has invested in the generation of data and data resources to better inform understanding of risk for immune-mediated and infectious diseases, their progression, treatment, and prevention. These data are available through various NIAID and NIH funded repositories, knowledgebases, as well as other publicly available data resources (a list of exemplar resources is available at https://www.niaid.nih.gov/research/data-science-resources-researchers).

Many of these data have potential utility beyond the specific hypotheses and questions for which they were originally generated. Their reuse fosters a research paradigm that leverages data to generate and/or refine hypotheses prior to experimental design. Moreover, further investigation of existing data sets, alone or in combination with other data, also provides opportunities to answer novel research questions at relatively low cost and justifies the value of investments made by NIAID/NIH and other funders in the repositories and knowledgebases for research use. The resulting studies might also reveal any barriers to data reuse and help identify tools needed and/or metadata that could be collected that will better enable data reuse by the broader community.

Principles of data sharing which state that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable (FAIR) form the premise of the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science. NIAID is committed to the management and sharing of data in alignment with these principles and to exploring how current NIAID repositories, knowledgebases, tools and other resources may need to be re-configured to coexist in a truly interoperable and usable research data ecosystem.

This NOSI invites applications proposing innovative informatics/data science projects that seek to answer novel scientific questions and address knowledge gaps in basic, translational and clinical, immune-mediated and infectious diseases by using data in repositories and knowledgebases. The projects may combine data from a variety of repositories and/or knowledgebases funded by NIAID in addition to other sources, including controlled-access and private user-generated data. The research focus areas of the applications must include infectious diseases, emerging infections, basic immunology or immune-mediated disease (i.e. allergy, autoimmunity, or immune reactions associated with transplantation). AIDS applications can additionally propose research using existing datasets to examine the interaction of mental health and mental health comorbidities, stigma, and other social behavioral determinants of health on HIV-related outcomes.

This notice applies to due dates on or after June 16, 2021 and subsequent receipt dates through May 7, 2024.

NOT-AI-21-011