Funding Opportunity Description
Developing medical countermeasures to protect civilians against intentional and accidental toxic chemical exposure that can lead to mass casualties is a major goal of the biodefense program at NIH. More specifically, this goal is executed by the Chemical Countermeasures Research Program (CCRP) at NIAID in partnership with several other ICs across the NIH (NIH Strategic Plan and Research Agenda for Medical Countermeasures Against Chemical Threats). NIAMS has been a critical and active partner in this trans-NIH effort since the CCRP’s inception in 2006. In order to broaden its research base and raise the awareness of the scientific community at large about the urgent need for effective countermeasures against chemical threats, the CCRP is encouraging its IC partners to issue IC-specific FOAs to further engage their respective research disciplines that are not currently engaged in the medical countermeasure research field. This initiative is a response to that request. The intent of the initiative is to encourage the NIAMS skin research community to contribute to the basic understanding of injuries caused by those toxic chemicals identified by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as high consequence public health threats and to explore the local and systemic mechanisms of chemical wound development, healing, and long-term consequences. It is envisaged that such initiative will benefit both the national civilian defense program as well as the basic skin wound healing research at large. This initiative will emphasize understanding commonalities in the fundamental mechanisms of skin injuries caused by vesicants such as sulfur mustard, Lewisite, nitrogen mustard, phosgene oxime, and arsenicals, which may be different from thermal burn. The investigators are also encouraged to collaborate with researchers in tissues other than skin that are affected by the vesicants (e.g., eyes and lung) to find commonalities of injury mechanisms shared with skin. It is hoped that the fundamental knowledge gained would ultimately lead to the discovery and characterization of potential shared therapeutic targets (e.g., in signal transduction pathways and inflammation process) and the development of broad-spectrum medical countermeasures.

This FOA is intended for investigators who are not currently supported under the CCRP’s CounterACT program but whose research interests are relevant to skin chemical injuries and to skin wound healing in general. It is assumed that the proposed project will represent a new direction for the applicant, which requires the applicant’s research lab to acquire new skills (e.g., handling toxic chemicals), gather new resources (e.g., establishing collaborative or contractual relationships with facilities certified to utilize restricted/controlled chemicals) and generate new preliminary data. Therefore, this FOA uses a planning mechanism (R34) to support such investigators to commence the preparatory steps toward this new line of study. This means that the applicants do not need to present preliminary data supporting the proposed study in concept, nor publication records and specific skills and proficiency in experimental execution in the chemical medical countermeasures field. However, the PD/PI should demonstrate prior experience in wound healing research and general knowledge relating to skin injury and healing.

It is expected that a successful outcome of a proposed project is that the investigator has added within the laboratory (if needed) personnel with the skills and expertise to conduct studies in this area, established a working relationship with facilities certified for toxic chemicals (if needed), and gathered sufficient preliminary data to support a more comprehensive research project suitable under the other more translationally-focused CCRP FOAs.