The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued a renewal of the Countermeasures Against Chemical Threats (CounterACT) Research Centers of Excellence cooperative agreement program.
The mission of the CounterACT program is to foster and support research and development of new and improved therapeutics for chemical threats, including traditional chemical warfare agents, toxic industrial chemicals, and pesticides.
CounterACT includes a network of Research Centers of Excellence, individual research projects, contracts and Interagency Agreements with the Department of Defense. This solicitation is designed to support research centers consisting of three or more subprojects and scientific cores that synergistically produce rigorous interdisciplinary research of the highest quality.
The Center will also include an administrative core to provide oversight, and a research education core to strengthen the research skills of the scientific workforce in the chemical countermeasures field of study. To ensure that the supported research is consistent with the overall goals of the program, CounterACT Research Centers of Excellence are milestone-driven cooperative agreements with substantial scientific and programmatic involvement by NIH staff.
The scope of the research includes target and candidate identification and characterization, through candidate optimization and demonstration of in vivo efficacy, through Investigational New Drug (IND)-enabling studies required for advanced development.
Further details are available via Funding Opportunity Announcement: PAR-10-181.
