The NIH Center for Human Immunology, Inflammation, and Autoimmunity (CHI) provides:
- Collaborative studies
- Technological development or enhancement
- Technology Partnership Program
Collaborative Study Proposals
Collaborative studies aim to leverage the high-dimensional technologies and expertise available in the CHI to enable systems-level characterization of immune phenotypes. These collaborations can integrate several of the platforms at the CHI, with substantial support from study design to computational analysis. This work will be done in the context of a collaboration with intramural principal investigator(s) (PI), for which we welcome proposals from any NIH institute on any topic involving human samples. As the CHI can undertake only a limited number of collaborative studies these will all be selected competitively by the SAB based on scientific merit, with tiered funding contributions determined by institutional standing funding for the CHI. Criteria for collaborative studies are:
- Studies should address clinically or biologically important questions, or characterization of conceptually valuable resources, where high dimensional human immune phenotyping can lead to significant insight. Typical examples are clinical trials with improvement of patient health, or interventional studies with longitudinal sampling spanning robust effects.
- Sample material and analysis designs should be compatible with high dimensional analysis. Early inclusion of the CHI can help to ensure appropriate features such as sample processing, demographic controls, and cohort size. Publishing immune phenotyping analyses will require individual-level data to be made available in public databases and this must be consistent with the consent obtained from all subjects.
- Collaborators with computational capacity or established support are favored, to promote analysis designs that combine understanding of study-specific biology with expertise to fully leverage systems level data.
Proposals should have well defined short-term goals achievable within a defined timeframe (usually one to two years) with go/no go decision points.
Read more about submitting a proposal.
Technological Development or Enhancement
Projects to develop new technologies are of interest to the CHI. For larger proposals, requests will be reviewed by the CHI Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). Criteria for technology development proposals are:
- Proposals could develop novel technologies, for example by onboarding an emerging technology or adapting a nascent approached developed in an investigators laboratory to deploy this for primary human samples.
- Enhancement of existing capabilities will also be supported, for example by optimizing an existing assay for a new sample type or transfer to a new technical platform with increased functionality.
- CHI is particularly interested in possibilities to assay human tissue samples, either by applying our existing assays for these sample types or developing novel technologies which could add insight in this context of tissue samples.
- Technologies to be developed should meet a need with broad demand and be established to a mature form where these could be of use to the broader NIH community.
- CHI will be responsible for developing milestones and overseeing the process of the technology development. The responsible principal investigator (PI) will provide scientific direction based on the scientific results generated by the CHI.
Read more about submitting a proposal.
Technology Partnership Program
A subset of the CHI’s technologies are available to NIH investigators through the CHI Technology Partnership Program in which study design, consumables, and data analysis are the responsibility of the customer. Here bioinformatic support will be restricted to data normalization and quality control.
For more information, contact Rachel Tracy, Executive Assistant, Rachel.tracy@nih.gov