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Research grant themes
In March/April 2018 we plan to award grants totalling up to £500,000 for research in the following areas:
Improving bowel cancer screening, with a particular focus on:
- Developing new forms of screening and early detection methods, such as breath and urine tests or that utilise different technologies such as capsule endoscopy
- Increasing screening uptake by testing different public interventions
- Ways to reduce demand for endoscopy tests so capacity can be released enabling the Faecal Immunochemical Test (FIT) sensitivity level to be improved. Examples include research into using another test to triage to the service or research projects that enable us to better understand and plan for endoscopy workforce demands
- Enabling risk stratification to be introduced into the screening programme, ensuring those at greatest risk are effectively screened. For example, we are interested in research which might utilise genomic information to prevent or detect cancer or that increases our understanding of how FIT performs in different groups such as women or black and minority ethnic communities.
Understanding and identifying people at high risk of bowel cancer, with a particular focus on:
- Improving the identification of people at higher risk by increasing our understanding amongst known risk groups, such as those with a strong family history or with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD)
- Practical improvements in surveillance screening such as the development of a national (or linked regional) database to aid call and recall systems, or research that investigates the best methods for ensuring everyone at higher risk gets the surveillance screening they need irrelevant of postcode.
Understanding bowel cancer in the under 50s, with a particular focus on:
- Increasing our understanding of the characteristics of bowel cancer in the under 50s
- Investigating the causes of growing numbers of cases for example through changes to the microbiome or environmental factors
- Enabling the diagnosis of younger people with bowel cancer more quickly
We aim to fund a combination of project and pilot grants.
Project grants
The project grant awards are aimed at supporting a piece of research for up to two years with a clearly defined subject area and outcomes. We will fund up to £75,000 per year, for up to two years, for any combination of salaries and consumables. You may also include budget for small items of essential equipment. All costs must be fully justified within the application.
Grants are only made for projects where the Principal Applicant has a contract at a UK host institution that extends beyond the life of the grant.
To request an application form and guidelines, or if you have any queries, please get in touch with us at research@bowelcanceruk.org.uk, letting us know that you would like a project grant application. The deadline for return of applications is 4pm Thursday 21 September 2017.
Pilot grants
Our pilot grants will include up to £25,000 for a grant of up to 18 months for a combination of salaries and consumables. Equipment costs cannot be included on these grants. Pilot grant funding enables novel, innovative research ideas without preliminary data to develop further.
To request an application form and guidelines, or if you have any queries, please get in touch with us at research@bowelcanceruk.org.uk, letting us know that you would like a pilot grant application form. The deadline for return of applications is 4pm Thursday 7 December 2017.
Timeline
The deadline date for the submission of project grant applications is 4pm Thursday 21 September 2017. Applicants will be notified if their application is going through to full peer review in mid-October and we will let applicants know if their application is being progressed to the Scientific Advisory Board meeting in January 2018. Both project and pilot grants will be awarded in March 2018.
Funding guidelines
Our project grant support provides up to two years of salary costs to cover required research posts, consumables and small items of essential equipment.
Our pilot grant support provides up to 18 months of salary costs to cover required research posts along with consumables.
All costs must be fully justified within the application.
Please note that we will only consider invited resubmissions. We will not fund through this scheme:
- Grants for further education, e.g. MSc/PhD and course fees
- Grants for Clinical Research Training Fellowships
- Grants for work undertaken outside the UK (co-applicants and collaborators may be from non-UK based institutes but the Principal Applicant must be based within the UK)
- Grants towards ‘top up’ funding for work supported by other funding bodies
- Grants to other charities
Research Policies
We support the Association of Medical Research Charities (AMRC) position statement on using animals in research. You can read our full statement here.
All members of our Scientific Advisory Board and Lay review Panel are required to sign up to our Conflict of Interest policy prior to reviewing any grant applications. You can read a copy of our Conflict of Interest Policy here.