Are you inventive? Entrepreneurial? Involved in cancer care or cure? If so, the NCI has two funding programs that may be of interest to you. They are the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs. These grants support the development and commercialization of  new technologies and products for cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. For those employed by a non-profit institution, STTR is the program you’d want to investigate; SBIR requires that the PI be primarily employed in a small business.

An article in Nature Biotechnology lays out the process of applying for SBIR and STTR grants.

Those seeking NIH funding for research involving animals may want to take a look at the updated training materials (as of 9/2/11) from the Office of Animal Laboratory Welfare (OLAW). Among the updates, there’s a Spanish-language video on “Working Safely with Nonhuman Primates” and a CD on “Mouse & Rat Humane Restraint and Experimental Techniques.”

OLAW also provides an optional worksheet to assist grant applicants prepare the Vertebrate Animal Section (VAS) of their NIH grant application. The worksheet is intended as well to assist reviewers in evaluating the grant submission.

Why would race or ethnicity make a difference in a researcher’s probability of being funded by NIH? That’s the question posed by an article in this Friday’s issue of Science, which found that African-American applicants are 10% “less likely than whites to be awarded NIH research funding.”

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