Welcome to today's webinar. I am Dr. Hongjun Wang. I'm a professor at the Medical University of South Carolina. My team studies islet biology, transplant immunology, and stem cell therapy in the context of type 1 diabetes and chronic pancreatitis. And I'm Dr. Nikki Farnsworth. I'm an assistant professor in chemical and biological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. My lab studies islet biology and uses biomaterials as a tool to investigate the progression of type 1 diabetes and develop new therapies to help prevent and treat disease. We are excited to welcome our panelists today to discuss funding opportunities in islet biology. Here's a glance at our agenda for today. We will provide a few announcements and we'll introduce our experts in a few moments. Each presenter will give a short lecture describing your institution's funding mechanisms and opportunities. And then the panel will take questions from the audience. Please don't wait until the end of the section to send in your questions. Instead, you can go ahead and tap it into the Q&A box in your control panel if you can look at that in your Zoom link. Please be sure to use the Q&A box and not the chat function for questions. And we will be using the chat box to send you a few links during the announcement segment. And you can use this space to chat with your fellow attendees. All right, I'm terribly sorry. I have a little bit of a computer problem. Dr. Fran Wars and I are both members of the American Diabetes Islet Biology Development and Function Interest Group Leadership Team, the team who coordinated this webinar, and I wanted to take a moment to thank all the members of the leadership team for their work throughout the years to provide opportunities to the interest group members. One such opportunity is the Islet Biology Development and Function Interest Group's Early Career Abstract Award. The abstract award is available for ADA members whose abstracts are accepted to the ADA's 84th Scientific Sessions. Abstracts submission is currently open until January 8, 2024, and if your abstract is accepted, you will be notified about abstract award opportunities. Another benefit of ADA membership is in connecting with members of the interest group on the Diabetes Pro Member Forum. You may have seen emails from me specifically for the Islet Biology Interest Group, but you can see the link in the chat below if you're interested in checking out that form. Finally, I would like to introduce today's first presenter. Dr. Albert Hua is a program director at the Division of Diabetes, Endocrinology, and Metabolic Disease at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive Kidney Disease, NIDDK. His current portfolio includes studies that focus on the development and regeneration of the pancreas endocrine compartment, as well as the application of this knowledge in stem cell differentiation and regenerative medicine. In addition, he participated in the Humanality Research Network, which organized and supported collaborative research related to loss of function of beta cell mass in type 1 diabetes. He's also part of the NIH project team for the tissue chip 2.0 consortium and serves as a project scientist for the macrophysiological system for modern disease. Prior to joining NIDDK, he was the operations director for Center for Cell-Based Therapy for Diabetes at Jocelyn Diabetes Center and a lecturer in medicine at Harvard Medical School. His research focused on stem cell deviation, the manufacturing of autologous islet cells, and transplantation methods. Before Jocelyn, he was the director of discovery research at JDIF, where he developed and managed research initiatives related to islet transplantation, bioengineering, stem cell research, and basal imaging. Dr. Hua received his bachelor degree of science in chemical engineering at Cornell and his PhD for bioengineering at MIT. Dr. Hua, thank you for coming here today. Thank you, Hongjun. Okay, I'm gonna share my screen. Okay, you can see this, right? Perfect. Thank you. Okay, great. Thank you for the invitation, and then I'm gonna try to pack in as much information as I can in a short span of time. So, as Hongjun introduced, I am a program director at NIDDK. We have three divisions, and I'm in a division of diabetes, endocrinology, and metabolic diseases. So, I think that's probably the most relevant for this interest group. I'm just gonna go right in. Okay, so NIDDK obviously, you know, funds a large array of research in the area that's related to diabetes and islet biology, and I listed some of the research areas that we're interested in, but this is not an exhaustive list. So, you know, in my portfolio and also in several other program directors' portfolios, we're interested in a basic mechanism underlying the organogenesis and regeneration of pancreatic islets during health and disease, and then really broadly, the physiology and pathophysiology of the endocrine and pancreas in diabetes. And then in my portfolio, I'm especially interested in the generation of islet cells from stem cells for disease modeling and also for regenerative medicine. And as Hongjun introduced, also in my past research background, we're also very interested in research in islet replacement or beta cell replacement and transplantation. The graphic here on the right is just to show you that if you go to the NIDDK website, if you, you know, go to the Research and Funding tab, and then go down to Research Programs and Contacts, we can then quickly browse under diabetes. There are a number of categories, and then if you then click into each one of them, it will then show you a list of the program directors that are working in that particular area. So then these two, you know, endocrine pancreas and the bioengineering technology and imaging are the two that I'm listed under. But then, as I said, there are other program directors working in similar areas. So once you click into those links, you will see our names and then our sort of more detailed description of our portfolios. And then that will help you then decide, you know, who may be the right person to contact to discuss your research ideas and questions. And then another site on the same website, but then just under a slightly different tab is, you know, under Research and Funding, if you go to Current Funding Opportunities, that's a really quick way for you to look up all the current funding opportunities that we have live at the moment. And then, you know, you can, like right now, for example, I think this was from yesterday, 113 are listed right now on our website. And you can sort this list by career level and the grant mechanism and also search by text. And then so just as an example, if you type in islet, you can see that two of these were isolated out of this long list. And I can actually go into this program later in a little bit more detail. But specifically for islet biology right now, you know, we have an RFA now for the HPAP T2D program. This is a deep phenotyping of human pancreas for type 2 diabetes, although this is sort of a single source RFA, so it may not apply to most of the people on this call. And then there's a more open call on the second one, which is on a new consortium on modeling autoimmune diabetes. And I can go into that in a little bit more detail later in slides. But this is just a really quick way for you to search and find the current funding opportunities. And then, you know, in addition to that, of course, you know, everyone probably knows there are parent funding opportunities where we just welcome regular cycles three times a year of investigator-initiated grant applications. But then regardless of which funding opportunities that you're looking at, I sort of listed some of the really basic things here that some of you may already know, but I just kind of wanted to emphasize here. So, you know, we always put the description in the funding opportunities just to show you the spirit of the notice. So, for example, the one that I mentioned, the new consortium on modeling autoimmune diabetes, you know, under the description, it will tell you why we want to solicit applications in this area and then what are the, you know, potential interesting topics that may fall under this funding opportunity. And then what type of applications we may be looking for. A lot of the funding opportunities are stated up front on whether clinical trials are allowed or not allowed. And oftentimes, there will be companion funding opportunities where they're related. So then one could be allowing clinical trial and one could be not allowing clinical trial. So that's something that you need to pay attention to. The other thing is the eligibility. When you read the funding opportunities, examples could be, for example, would it require U.S. citizenship or residency? One of the things that you need to watch out for, as well as foreign component versus foreign entities being allowed to apply or not. Oftentimes, foreign entities may not, might not be allowed to apply. So that's something, you know, if you're applying from abroad, you know, that might be something that you have to pay attention to. But then in terms of foreign component, it's not uncommon for applications to include subcontracts and collaborators who are outside the U.S. And then for some funding opportunities, we do allow such foreign components to come in. For specific RFAs, you may want to pay attention to the review criteria because those are, in addition to your standard review criteria that you see for typical R01s, you may see additional review, you know, specifications that we provide to the reviewers listed under the funding opportunities. And I think that's quite important. And some people don't always scroll all the way down to the page to read that. And of course, the scientific contact is listed at the end of the funding opportunity. And that's the person that you should contact if you have any questions, just to bat your ideas to see if it's suitable or any kind of logistical questions. You know, you're always welcome to contact that person to ask. And then just a really quick explanation of, you know, we're all pretty familiar with the R01s or the R awards. These are your typical bread and butter research grants. But then there are also these NIH U awards. And U awards are typically, you know, what we call cooperative agreements. So those will be awards where the NIH program officials and program officers would have a little bit more involvement in interacting with the investigators and then, you know, just discussing the direction of the progress and also the direction of the research. Very often are used for consortium type of awards. So those, the terms and conditions will be quite different between R and U. So that's another thing to pay attention to. And then I just wanted to quickly let people know that, you know, our current funding policy is listed on our website. And we are currently already in fiscal year 2024. But FY 2023 was just passed. And then the pay line for the R01s was 16th percentile. And there was a question, Nikki provided a list of some questions that people wanted to ask on this webinar. And someone asked about whether there's some specific opportunities for early stage investigators. So for NIH, these investigators who have not received any R01 or R01 equivalent competing awards in the past and are still within 10 years of their terminal research degree or medical residency, we turn, we call these investigators early stage investigators. And then they enjoy a more generous pay line. So compared to the 16th percentile, their R01 pay line was set at 25th percentile. And then another benefit is that when they come back, you know, four or five years later, to have a competing renewal of that very first R01 that they received, that renewal is also set at a more generous percentile. So these numbers were for the previous fiscal year. And we're currently in 2024. We don't actually have a budget from the US government because we're operating on the continuing resolution. And so our current pay line has not been set yet. So here, I'm going to jump into a couple of more ILIT specific funding opportunities and also infrastructure and resources. So the Human ILIT Research Network is this really large sort of conglomerate of consortia that we have been funding since 2014, excuse me. And you can see these are the existing consortia. I'm not going to read everything out here, but then suffice to say that we have a consortium of HPAC, which, you know, including the T2D Human Pancreas Analysis Program that I mentioned earlier, that's up for competition now. This basically is a number of awards that are doing deep tissue phenotyping. And then the data is then, you know, released for the entire community to use. We have consortia focusing on helping beta cells to, you know, survive and then reduce their death and also targeting them and then regenerating them. And these are the CTAR and CBDS are the two consortia. And then we have the CMAI and CHIP. These two are the consortia that focus on in vitro and in vivo models to model type 1 diabetes. And these two consortia basically will be re-competed in a new form in the new RFA that I mentioned earlier, the CMAD, the Consortium of Modeling Autoimmune Diabetes. And that new RFA, once it's competed, that new consortium will replace these two consortia listed here. So, as you can see, this is a really large number of investigators and consortia that are really interested in finding out how beta cells are lost and how can we prevent and halt or reverse the loss of human beta cells in type 1 diabetes. There's also a fantastic coordinating center that's doing all the coordination between all the consortia. And then this network regularly has funding opportunities that are released. So, currently there are two, as you saw earlier. And then as we get a new budget from Congress, because this program is supported by the special type 1 diabetes research funding appropriation from Congress. So, this has received quite a generous support. And we do optimistically hope that that funding will be renewed year after year. And so we do expect that in the future, additional funding opportunity will be provided for this human islet research network. Another resource that you're probably already familiar with is the Integrated Islet Distribution Program, IIDP. This is also supported by our institute. And the most well-known part is that it provides human islets for researchers. It's a subscription service. So, you need to sign up and then enter a bunch of information. And there is a baseline subscription fee. And based on your needs, in terms of the number and the type of islets that you need, there are different cost structures for that. So, that's one service that's provided. But in addition to that, because of the huge number of pancreases and islets that come through this program, there are additional analysis work that's done under IIDP. And one is the HIPP, or the Human Islet Phenotyping Program, that's being headed by Marcella Brasova at Vanderbilt. So, basically, all the islets that go out of IIDP that go into the hands of investigators like you, they are phenotyped in terms of the functional responses. And then there's also the genotyping initiative that's headed by Anna Goyn at Stanford. So, in addition to the functional analysis, we also genotype all the islets. So, then all of this data is out there and available for analysis and for use, for you to look at. So, I think that's something that will be of interest to you guys. Other resources, including the PANC-DB. So, the data that I described from the Human Pancreas Analysis Program, or HPAP, once they're analyzed, they are deposited at this website called PANC-DB. And then NIDDK also supports DKNet, which is a fantastic resource that connects you to other resources out there on the web and then connecting you to databases. And then there's also a hypothesis center that allows people to analyze and explore data to generate new research hypotheses. So, these are also resources I think that may be of interest to you. Moving into sort of the training and career development area, because there was also a question about what NIDDK does in this area. So, in this arrow here, this describes from undergrad to graduate school, postdoc, junior faculty to established faculty. All along the spectrum, we have a bunch of different funding mechanisms to support this career growth. On the bottom, you have the institutional awards. On the top, you have the individual awards. And so in terms of faster track, you have the K99, K00, R, sorry, excuse me, F99, K00 for the pre-doc, and then the K99, R00 for the post-doc area. That's sort of a faster track. And then you have the mentored award or the more well-known K award here. And then we also have the R03 supplements for those people who have received the K award. And then we also have the loan repayment program. So all along here, I think depending on your current career status, there could be a potential opportunity for you to apply for funding support. We also are very interested in promoting diversity in our workforce. And so again, all along the spectrum of career stage, there are different funding opportunities here. I won't be able to go into the details here, but just suffice to show you that they are available here. And then I actually, I will have a QR code, I think two slides later. So maybe you can take a picture and I will also provide a bunch of the links to Nikki who will then send that out after the webinar. There was a question that came in before the webinar about emerging physician scientists and whether there's a specific funding opportunity for them. So actually we do have a notice of a special interest for administrative supplements to support those physician scientists who want to get into research, but haven't had as much postdoctoral training yet. So then this NOSI basically will support candidates with less than four years of postdoc experience and those who can bring clinical perspectives to, it could be basic behavioral or even clinical research project in my division, the diabetes and endocrinology division. But this has to be done as a supplement to an existing funded award. So let's say a PI is already funded with an R01 studying some kind of islet biology question, and then you are a physician scientist that's interested in working in that lab, and that fits, excuse me, that fits the area that I listed here, then you may be able to talk to that PI and then see if the PI may be interested in taking you on and then apply for this administrative supplement to that award. And this will then provide you with protected time from your clinical work. So then you have protected six to nine months a year to do the research. And then specifically US citizenship or permanent residency is not required with this particular funding opportunity. So just really quickly, we have different program directors that are responsible for these different training and development awards. So here's a QR code that you can take a picture, and then I also provide the link later so then you can refer back to it. And also, I just want to bring up the fact that there are changes coming to the way that NIH is reviewing all the grants. So in terms of what was being done before and what is changing, so currently we have five categories that are being scored during review. And then after January 25th, 2025, these will be shrunken down to basically scoring only two factors. Factor one is going to be importance of the research. And so we're combining significance and innovation. Factor two will be rigor and feasibility. So then this will be the approach that's being reviewed now. So then only these two factors will be individually scored. Factor three will be expertise and resources. So then this will be on the investigator, the institution, the environment, but then this one would not be scored. So this is just something to keep in mind. We're trying to make the review as more fair and then hopefully this will do that. And then lastly, if you again, go back to the NIDDK website, if you go to news and then go to followers, you can then subscribe to receive email updates. So then whenever there's a new funding opportunity that's being released, that's an email that gets regularly sent out. So then you would not miss that alert. So I hope I gave enough information in a short amount of time and I'm happy to take questions. Perfect, thank you so much, Dr. Hua. At this point, I'd like to introduce our next speaker, Dr. Jay Tinklepaw. Dr. Tinklepaw is a scientist in the research department at the JDRF. He is a member of the Disease Modifying Therapies Project, part of the CURES program. And in this role, Dr. Tinklepaw uses his background in protein biochemistry, cell biology and targeted drug design to help advance JDRF's mission of getting more disease modifying therapies into the clinic. Prior to joining JDRF, Dr. Tinklepaw completed his postdoctoral training at Weill Cornell Medical College, where he performed research on the design of antibody drug conjugates for the treatment of advanced stage and treatment resistant cancers. His graduate work at Syracuse University was focused on lysosomal protein biochemistry and metabolic stage storage disorders. Jay has been living with type 1 diabetes for more than 18 years and we are very thankful for you in coming and speaking to us today. Thanks, Nikki. Hopefully everyone can see this. There we go. All right, so hi everyone. As Nikki said, my name's Jay Tinklepaw. I'm one of the scientists at JDRF. And today I'm going to hopefully very quickly run through some of the current research priorities and initiatives that we have at JDRF, some discussion of our overall research strategy, what areas we're really funding at the moment. And hopefully get to at the very end some of the current opportunities that we have for early stage investigators, as well as those with really established academic careers. So JDRF's stated goal is really to improve the lives of those living with type 1 diabetes and ultimately to cure, prevent and treat T1D. And that mission really drives our overall research strategy. So we prioritize funding that has the highest likelihood of accelerating the delivery of different therapies to cure and prevent, while also maintaining a strategic gap-filling funding position and research that improves the lives with diabetes. And so obviously this is a very relevant and important topic. And as you can see over the last couple of years, the incidence of type 1 diabetes has just continued to increase. And so JDRF is really focused on halting this over time. So I just wanted to provide a bit of an overview of JDRF and sort of all the different aspects of research policy development and advocacy that we touch on. So at JDRF, we have individuals that work on what we call, on every step of what we call the pipeline. So there are scientists like me that help identify discovery research that we think is significant and should be funded. We advocate for additional government research. We also conduct and invest alongside for-profit funders in the T1D area. And of course work to advance different clinical trials. We also have individuals outside more traditional scientist roles focused on improving the regulatory process for type 1 diabetes, improving healthcare coverage, covering things like pumps, insulins, automated glucose sensors, et cetera. And then ultimately finding ways to get all of the exciting progress that we've made in type 1 diabetes out into the field. So continuing to support healthcare provided education and making sure that all of that is known and accessible by the diabetes community. So within the research department, we're really broken up into five main areas. Our global universal screening efforts, disease modifying therapies, cell therapies, improving lives and our training programs focused on sort of the next generation of researchers and clinicians. And I'll talk a little bit about all of these. So why screening for type 1 diabetes? So, as I showed earlier, we know T1D is on the rise in all of these geographies and ethnicities. Screening is critically important because it helps reduce DKA onset. And this has really, really beneficial long-term outcomes. This also helps identify more people who are at risk and helps us accelerate development of preventative treatments purely by just identifying more people that can be incorporated into ongoing clinical trials. And really it cannot be stressed enough that our current efforts are only reaching about 10% of the population. And we're really working to expand that. So our screening strategy is really built around these three avenues, improving research for the identification of new biomarkers that are better able to assess T1D risk, expanding screening to all individuals, regardless of age, ethnicity, geography, continuing to emphasize monitoring and awareness and education, and then hopefully advocating for policy change to support broad general population screening efforts. And you can see that GDRF has supported a number of large screening programs around the world, including several in the U.S. that are sort of tangentially related and work with other investigators that we've funded, as well as in Europe, the Middle East, and Australia and New Zealand. And so I promised that I would talk about some of the major priority areas that we have. One of the main areas of interest at the moment is identifying and validating biomarkers associated with T1D progression. And these can be immune-focused or beta cell-focused. Currently, right now, we have this breakdown of the different stages of type 1 diabetes. And below that, we have the different tools that we use to assess risk as the disease progresses. So genetic risk scores, immune markers, islet autoantibodies, as well as metabolic markers. But we're always looking to identify new biomarkers that can better monitor and determine whether or not the disease is actually progressing or any potential therapy is actually having its desired positive effect. So the next area I'll cover is disease-modifying therapies. So this area of JDRF research sort of is broken into two areas, what we call the immune side and the beta cell side. So on the immune side, the main goal here is to turn off the autoimmune attack against insulin-producing beta cells. And then on the beta cell side, we are looking to create and sustain the beta cell population. Now that can either be through the prevention of beta cell death, the maintenance of beta cell function, or the generation of entirely new populations of beta cells within the body to replace those that have been lost as T1D advances. And we've had some pretty exciting progress in this over the last year. As some of you or all of you may be aware, we now have a disease-modifying therapy for T1D. This is T-Zield. It may have taken 30 years for us to get here, but for the first time, we actually have something that is approved to delay T1D and at-risk individuals. So in the future, we're continuing to push for more commercially available disease-modifying therapies that cover these areas. We wanna maintain and hold the position that it's unlikely that there will be one magic cure-all therapy for type 1 diabetes. And so we support research that really examines different avenues for improving beta cell health, modulating the immune system, or so on. And then continuing to advance these towards the clinic, either by developing new targeted strategies or pretty much anything under the sun related to getting these closer to the clinic. So I'll next talk about some cell therapies and exciting progress in this area. So what are cell therapies? The goal of a cell therapy is to replace the loss of functional pancreatic islets. The goal of this obviously being to restore insulin independence, glucose control. And GDRF, we support projects in this area either by supporting preclinical and clinical testing, advancing to regulatory approval, and trying to ensure access for when these things have actually gone through successful clinical trials, that they will be available to the broader type 1 diabetes community. And research within the cell therapies portfolio at GDRF is focused really in four main areas. Encapsulation of islet-derived, excuse me, islets derived from stem cells. The generation of scaffolds that islet, excuse me, islet cell therapies can be attached to and then implanted in the body. Finding ways to locally modulate the immune response and even gene editing to make these new islets effectively invisible or non-reactive with a patient's immune system. And so we have many academics working in this space. And just to sort of show the progress and the priorities in this particular area, we're supporting several projects focused on improving cell sources, either by increasing the number of stem cell-derived insulin-producing cells that are available to the larger community and the larger research community and ultimately to patients, as well as looking at different xenomodels, improving the differentiation process. And then as I mentioned on the previous slide, identifying new ways to not only deliver these islet grafts, but also improve their survival, durability and ensure that patients will have a choice and that ultimately it's a cost-effective approach for treating and curing type 1 diabetes. And so the next and second to last area that I'll cover today is the Improving Lives Portfolio at JDRF. So Improving Lives area is focused on individuals that have established longstanding type 1 diabetes and really by improving therapies and treatments through better artificial pancreas systems, increasing the number of drugs that are available for complications related to type 1, developing better insulins and other drugs that you can combine with insulin. So rather than just taking insulin in a vacuum, what else could we add to it that hopefully improves glucose control? And then finally, also focusing heavily on addressing the psychosocial burden associated with type 1. And so at the moment, we have a number of semi-automated AP systems, pumps, CGMs available. There's several different types of insulin, glucagon strategies, and a number of industrial industry partnerships that are working on addressing complications in this space. But in the future, we hope and are supporting research to drive us towards these things, either full automation, increasing the usability of the different devices, continuous ketone monitoring, and then a number of different interventions focused on either improving insulin, adjunctive therapies, kidney disease, eye disease, and all the mental health interventions. And so now, I know there were several questions related to this that came in. I'll talk about some of the funding opportunities that JDRF has at the moment. So at JDRF, there's really two broad funding mechanisms through which we work with either academics or industry partners. The first is the Strategic Research Agreement, and this is really designed to provide research funding for investigators to address critical gaps and challenges in the field. These are open and eligible to all sorts of institutions, and institutions, academics, depending on the stage of development, even maybe non-traditional individuals working in non-academic settings. And by that, I mean government partners. Many of our screening projects work in that particular area. And then we also have industry discovery and development partnerships. And these are really intended to support for-profit entities on research programs that are really closely aligned to those priority areas that I covered in earlier slides. And these are really focused on accelerating the discovery, development, and commercialization of different therapeutics and devices for treating, curing, preventing type 1. And the idea is, hopefully, that they foster long-term collaborative relationships. Now, obviously, the terms and conditions and the exact requirements needed for submission to either of these two funding mechanisms is a little bit different. And there will be links that I will send around and show on the last slide where you can find more information related to them. We also have a number of funding opportunities that are open right now. On the left, you can see that we have, at the moment, three open requests for applications. First one, the first two, the letters of intent, are due in January. And they're focused on developing interventions to modulate immune cell trafficking. And the second one on glycemic and beta cell monitoring in individuals at risk of developing T1D. We also have the project concepts call. The letters of intent are due a little bit farther out for this one. They're the 2nd of May. And this is a general call for strategic research agreement proposals. It doesn't have to, as long as it's in one of our strategic areas, all are welcome to submit an LOI there. And then we hope in the next couple of months to have even more RFAs announced. And I encourage you all to keep an eye out for those. And then alongside these RFAs, we also have a number of ongoing opportunities. So JDRF frequently launches what we call the innovative awards. And this is a solicitation for proposals that are highly innovative in the field of type 1 diabetes. Generally, we consider these to be higher risk projects. They have a lower barrier to entry in terms of the required preliminary data associated with them. And the letters of intent are due for that in January 17. And then every year, as I mentioned on one of the earlier slides as well, JDRF supports a number of different training awards. So we have postdoctoral fellowships, advanced postdoctoral fellowships, career development awards, and one that is focused on the early career patient-oriented diabetes research. So currently, the calls for these applications are closed. But the next one should open in the spring of 2024. And so thank you, everyone. I've included these two links. And we'll send them around in the chat. You can find more information on just about everything I talked about today on either of these two websites, the Grant Center Funding Opportunities and then Grant Center Research Strategy. Thanks. Thank you so much. This is great information. I've been funded by the JDRF and AIDDK for the past 20 years. I still wish I knew all this years ago. Fantastic. I see no questions from the QA here. I'll start one with Jay. Jay, you didn't mention anything about the payline of JDRF. And my personal feeling, I think JDRF supported a lot of junior investigators at my age 20 years ago. And does JDRF still have emphasized on junior investigator? Do they get better payline? Can you comment on that? Thank you. Yeah, so it's not as formalized as it is to an NIH grant. But we've continued to stress and hopefully bring in and support junior or younger faculty members. That is a major priority and focus of JDRF. In terms of how that's been reflected in actual grant sizes and percentages allocated for different things, I couldn't give you a specific number. But it has increased over time, obviously, as the costs and everything else has. Glad to hear that. Just a reminder that if you have questions, you'd like to see answered live, please type those into the Q&A box. I think we're going to continue on. We have a list of questions that was submitted prior to the event. So we'll just keep chugging through those questions. This one's going to be for Dr. Hua. I'm going to paraphrase this one a little bit. And the question is basically asking if there are federal budget cuts or government shutdowns and things, how does that impact things like paylines or the development of special initiatives from the NIH perspective? Yeah. So if there is a budget, even if there's not a budget cut, because right now with the continuing resolution as an example, we are basically operating in the current fiscal year of 2024 using the 2023 budget level. And given inflation and everything, if you keep the same level of funding, you're essentially having a budget cut because you can't do as much with the same amount of money. So that is why, as I mentioned, the 2023 payline was at 16. And so whenever we are proceeding in a new fiscal year without a true budget, we are proceeding cautiously. And then we are currently not using 16th percentile. And then we're right now using 15th as sort of a temporary percentile to operate. So yeah, so the federal cuts definitely has an effect on our budget. Perfect. All right, I have another question for you. You started with a single-source RFAs. Can you tell us the difference between single-source RFA and the regular RFA? I'm sure probably from the RFA itself, it has the information. But I mean. Yeah, so this is a, I don't think this happens very often. I think in this particular case, an argument was made to welcome an application from a single entity because this is a renewal. And this is a resource that we're going to deeply phenotype a human pancreas. And the type of methodology, and then the data processing, and then even down to the personnel, the type of reagent that you use. We want to make sure that the new data is backwards compatible and as standardized as possible. So then all the data from the previous funding round will still be congruous with the new data coming out. So in that particular case, through the funding opportunity development process, it was determined that it will be a single source. So in this particular case, I believe UPenn was named in the RFA. And so that will be the one that will be eligible to apply. And so other institutions will not be able to apply. But I want to emphasize that for the most part, the vast majority of the funding opportunities are open wide to everyone to apply. And then as I mentioned, the Human Islet Research Network, all these RFAs for HEARN are open to the community. So even if you're not currently a funded HEARN investigator, you are still welcome to apply. And then for people who are currently in HEARN, they have to apply if they want to get renewal and they need to compete. So there's no just sort of passive continuous funding. I think we have two questions in our Q&A chat. The first question is, what kind of support from mentor and institution are crucial for success for a K01 award? Hold on. I just, OK. I think it's a number of things that you will have to discuss with your mentor specifically. I think it's somewhat of a case by case basis, especially a PhD versus like an MD candidate. I think the type of additional training and the resources that the institution and the mentor would need to and would like to provide to the mentee, I think it will be quite different for each person. So I think it's a little bit difficult to answer this in specifics. But then I think everything from the technical training in the laboratory to courses that you can take to conferences that you're able to attend, and then assembling a diverse and well-rounded advisors that in addition to just your primary mentor and also the environment of the institution, there could be seminars and core facilities and whatnot. I think it's about bringing together a really well-rounded package that's tailored for you that whatever needs at your career stage, that needs to be sort of complemented by this package. I think that's what makes a successful application. Next question will be a very hard one from Roy. How much preliminary data is required and important for an ideal grant submission? Is that for me or for Jay? For both, I guess. I think it depends on which grant mechanism, right? I think for your typical R01, I think you need a pretty substantial preliminary data. There are grant mechanisms where we don't require as much like R21. However, I want to point out that for NIDDK, NIDDK does not participate in the parent announcement of pre or non-clinical R21. So unfortunately, for a lot of the basic IELTS research, we don't currently have the R21 mechanism for that. Jay, what's your view on that? Yeah, so it also really does depend on the specific mechanism. In the case of our typical SRAs, the Strategic Research Agreements, you usually need a pretty robust preliminary data package. On the other hand, the Innovative Awards have no prelim data requirements. In some cases, it can only help your case if you have some proof of concept data. But we've funded very successful and exciting projects in that area where it was just an idea. All right, and then our last question. For junior faculty who lost the ESI limit, do they still qualify for new investigator 3 percentile additional leverage if they have not received an R1 in the past? And maybe I'll expand on that a little bit to say, taking into account COVID, what are sort of the current policies on extending that ESI limit? So there is specifically a, I can't remember if it's actually just an email or actually an office that receives requests to extend your ESI status. So the easiest example often is women who may have to take time off when they had children. So for circumstances like that, or during COVID, some people may need to take time off to take care of their family members. So yes, so those are definitely taken into consideration. And then you can extend the ESI status, which I think is incredibly useful. But then specifically to this question, unfortunately, if you lose the ESI limit, we do not have the more generous pay line. That's reserved only for ESI. OK, next question, I think it's for Jay. And I can answer that as well. Is a career development award of GDIF restricted to tenured faculty only, or a person is non-tenured position can apply? My choice is both, but Jay? So we do not specifically exclude anyone who is in a non-tenured position. It is, for the most part, open to anyone that has a faculty level position in a department. All right, no more questions in the Q&A. Can I ask another one to Albert? If the renewal grant of an established investigator has any advantage compared to, you said if a new investigator renew their R01, they have 19%, some 3% more chance to get it, right? 3% more chance to get it, right? If it's an established investigator renew their R01, do they get any extra credit? I mean, extra percentage or not? No, unfortunately not, because you guys are so well established and doing so well, so we do not extend the same kind of pay line, yeah. Yeah, but still, I think 25% pay line for new investigators is really exciting, and we encourage young investigators to apply for it. It's almost goes back to the good old days, whatever. It's very nice. OK, any other questions? I have one more question, I think, for Jay, that came from the list of questions that we received. And this one goes into the clinical specifics about how JDRF is different and how you work with a program officer with JRE to discuss an SRA. And then the second part of the question is, do you need an industry partner in mind, or will JDRF help you find a good match for your work? I think this is a good question. OK, yeah. So I'll cover the first part. So we have those list of open opportunities that I included in the slide deck. And I did send around to the chat a link to the website that has all of the additional information on that. However, one of the ways in which an investigator can work with JDRF is by directly reaching out to myself or someone else on the research team. We're always happy to discuss potential project ideas. If you have a letter of intent already put together, and maybe it was something that you submitted through NIH or a different foundation's funding mechanism, you're always free to share that, irrespective of whether or not there's a current project concepts call or something else. And we generally do our best to provide honest feedback or, in some cases, even invite to a full proposal. And we can work pretty collaboratively with investigators to help structure or refine whatever it is they're working on. And then to cover the industry side of things, generally, if you are in an academic setting and looking to partner or develop a technology further into an industrial application or commercialization process, we try to encourage that you have a partner in mind and maybe even have had some of the early discussions with them. However, if you have an academic project or an SRA that's actively being supported by JDRF, one of our value-added components is we can introduce you to our different partners that we've worked with in the past in a successful way or even help you to put together a pitch, essentially, for it. Yeah. OK. Thank you so much. I think we are just about out of time. Any last things to mention, Hongjun? There's no more questions. We'll be very appreciative. Thank you for Alberto and Jie again to spend time with us today. And thank you for the audience to join us. This is really informative. And we thank the NIDDK and JDRF for support diabetes research, specifically on islet biology, development, and function. Nikki, do you have anything else to add? I just want to thank Nikki Sosong and the ADA team for helping us to put on this webinar. This was a really fantastic opportunity. And we're grateful that you could put this on today. All right. Happy holidays, guys. Thank you so much.

webinar

Dr. Albert Hua

National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases

NIDDK

Dr. Jay Tinklepaw

JDRF

funding opportunities

islet biology

research priorities