Introduction:

This Request for Applications (RFA) welcomes proposals that will make significant contributions toward single-cell reference data for the community of patients, clinicians, and researchers engaged in pediatric research. This opportunity is intended to support active collaborative teams of researchers that have access to established resources and protocols that are ready to be extended and scaled. The opportunity is also intended to support new collaborative teams that will benefit from the experience of existing teams while bringing complementary and differentiated perspectives and resources. The opportunity aims to support a variety of collaborative teams that will all make contributions to the larger community via regular engagement and sharing of learnings, data, samples, and other resources.

Call objectives:

CZI Pediatric Networks grants have the following overarching scientific goals:

• Generate and share data that will contribute to and establish references for organs and tissues during age windows that will clarify childhood development and maximize utility for understanding pediatric disease;
• Represent diverse ancestries in data collected, with the goal of generating references that will promote understanding of disease in populations and communities with increased incidence of childhood disease;
• Build international collaborations that promote coordinated and cohesive progress and contribute to the Human Cell Atlas;
• Identify and address shared computational or infrastructural bottlenecks, to ensure that data generated as a part of this reference can be analyzed, incorporated, and shared as a part of a global reference;
• Collect and share biospecimens, including generating and disseminating solutions for challenges associated with ancestral diversity and vulnerable status of young donors, engagement with communities and families/patients, and storing tissue for subsequent single-cell analysis; and
• Promote collaboration with other funded tissue networks and projects that are actively involved in the HCA as well as other CZI efforts, such as Rare As One , Inflammation , the Neurodegeneration Challenge Network , Essential Open Source Software , and others.

This RFA is intended to support established teams as well as new collaborations. It is anticipated that successful applications will include teams that vary in size from small (three to four PIs on the team) to midsized (five to 10 PIs on the team) working together to make progress toward reference maps of healthy pediatric tissues

Call options:

Specific examples may include, but are not limited to:

• Focused atlases or data generation on single organs, tissues, or multiple organs from single donors;
• Opportunities to develop and share tissue resources that will support standards, protocols, and tissue access to pediatrics researchers and clinicians; and
• Computationally focused networks that will address common challenges faced with the assembly, interpretation, and use of pediatric reference data.

Budget:

Because varying projects require different resourcing levels, a budget limit has not been set on a per project basis. Proposed budgets should reflect the project scope. Indirect costs cannot exceed 15% of direct costs.

Eligibility:

• Teams should consist of at least three principal investigators (PIs), including at least one computational biologist or data scientist, one pediatrician actively engaged in clinical care, and at least one expert in single-cell biology.
• Organizations may be based in any country.
• Applications examining prenatal and fetal development are not eligible for this opportunity, nor are applications proposing sampling of adult tissues (greater than 18 years of age).
• Applications may be submitted by domestic and foreign nonprofit organizations, public and private institutions, such as colleges, universities, hospitals, laboratories, units of state and local government, and eligible agencies of the federal government. For-profit organizations are not eligible to apply. All grants will be awarded to institutions, not individuals.

Application:

Proposed projects should be three years in duration with a projected start date no earlier than October 1, 2021. Actual start date may vary.

All applications must be completed and submitted through CZI's online grants management portal. It is recommended that applicants familiarize themselves with this portal well in advance of the application deadline. Detailed application instructions are available on the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative website, as well as in the grant's management portal.

In case of interest, please contact lnorton(ELIMINAR)@fsjd.org