External Funding Opportunities

- Research Stay Abroad - each funding source offers funding for research stays abroad for the candidates:

• The Faculty of Medicine - Postdoctoral fellows with UiB funding: granted for stays 3-12 months. Deadline: 1 March and 1 October.
• Helse Vest: granted for 6 or 12 months. Postdoctoral fellowship applicants are especially encouraged to apply for an overseas fellowship over the course of their fellowship period. Continuing deadline
• Research Council of Norway: granted for 3-12 months. Continuing deadline

- EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization) Fellowships Research on the molecular mechanisms of life at all levels.

• Short-term Short-Term Fellowships fund research exchanges of up to three months between laboratories in eligible countries.
• Long-term The EMBO Long-Term Fellowships are awarded for a period of up to two years and support post-doctoral research visits to laboratories throughout Europe and the world. Deadline: throughout the year.

- As of 2019, Research Council of Norway will introduce a new grant application process. The new deadline for researcher projects, young research talent and mobility grants will be 10 April 2019. The deadline for innovation projects will be in September. Please refer to this page for an overview of the various announcements and their deadlines. In addition, you can see preliminary versions of the evaluation criteria and dates for webinars.

The most important changes:

• An application can be evaluated by all relevant programs announced on the same deadline
• New evaluation criteria: Excellence, impact and implementation
• New templates
• One principal investigator can send a maximum of two applications at the 10 April deadline using identical applications (to be evaluated by, for instance, young research talent and mobility grant programs) or diffe applications (to be evaluated by different programs (for example FRIPRO and BEDREHELSE)
• One researcher can participate as partner in an unlimited number of applications
• Researcher projects will have a finance span of 4-12 million NOK
• The mobility grant will extend from a maximum of 6 years after defense date to a maximum of 7 years
• The complete versions should be available during January 2019

Horizon2020 - several calls. Selected H2020 deadlines 2018:

1. European Research Council (ERC) Frontier research grants

- Consolidator Grant - Researchers of any nationality with 7-12 years of experience since completion of PhD (Extensions are possible under certain circumstances — see the latest ERC Work Programme), a scientific track record showing great promise and an excellent research proposal. Deadline: 7 February 2019.

2. Marie Sklodovska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Excellent and innovative research training plus attractive career and knowledge-exchange opportunities through cross-border and cross-sector mobility, no thematic priorities.

- MSCA-Research and innovation staff exchage (RISE) -2019: RISE supports mobility and exchange of research and innovation staff, incl.managerial, technical and administrative staff, between institutions in different sectors in Europe and/or with research institutions in countries outside of Europe. Deadline: 2 April 2019

3. Societal Challenges (SC): Collaborative breakthrough research and radical innovation

Selected calls from SC1-2018-2019: Health, demographic change and wellbeing:

1 stage, deadline 16 April 2019

• SC1-BHC-07-2019: Regenerative medicine: from new insights to new applications
• SC1-BHC-10-2019: Innovation Procurement: Next generation sequencing (NGS) for routine diagnosis
• SC1-BHC-13-2019: Mining big data for early detection of infectious disease threats driven by climate change and other factors
• SC1-BHC-28-2019: The Human Exposome Project: a toolbox for assessing and addressing the impact of environment on health
• SC1-HCO-01-2018-2019-2020: Actions in support of the International Consortium for Personalised Medicine
• BHC-31-2019 - Pilot actions to build the foundations of a human cell atlas
• BHC-32-2019 - Towards a next generation influenza vaccine to protect citizens worldwide – an EU-India collaboration
• HCO-15-2019 - Support for the functioning of the Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness (GloPID-R)

- NEW: IMI2 – Call 17: updated draft texts

The following topics are under consideration for inclusion in the next IMI Call for proposals. These topics are now at an advanced stage of development and we hope that these drafts will allow potential applicants to start working actively on proposals and forming consortia. These topics must be approved by the IMI Governing Board. The final topic text may differ from the draft versions published here, and applicants should always base their proposals on the final, approved topic texts which will be published when the Call is officially launched.

• Optimising future obesity treatment
• Open access chemogenomics library and chemical probes for the druggable genome
• Intelligent prediction and identification of environmental risks posed by human medicinal products

PS: The call for proposals is planned to open on 22 January 2019. IMI will hold webinars on IMI2 – Call 17 from Wednesday 23 January to Thursday 31 January 2019 inclusive. Registration is free but obligatory via the links given for each webinar.

- NEW: The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI2) has published preliminary information on future call topics for inclusion in IMI2 calls in the longer term. Topics under consideration are:

• Neurodegeneration and other neuroscience priorities
• Immunology
• Infection control including vaccines
• Translational safety
• Big data, digital health, clinical trials and regulatory research
• Oncology
• Facilitating the translation of advanced therapies to patients in Europe
• Other enablers of research topics

Please visit the call page for details of the specific research fields under the listed topics that could be included in the upcoming call.

- EuroNanoMed - Nanomedicine: The call aims to support translational research projects that combine innovative approaches in the field of nanomedicine. Project proposals need to cover at least one of the following areas that are equal in relevance for this call:

• Regenerative medicine
• Diagnostics
• Targeted delivery system

Deadline for pre-proposal: 31 January 2019

- JPI on Antimicrobial Resistance Call on Diagnostics and Surveillance: The call with a budget of €20 million supports the development of diagnostic and surveillance tools, technologies and methods to detect antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Projects should address the diagnosis of AMR infections in clinical and veterinary settings, or the surveillance of AMR in humans, animals and the environment. The deadline for submitting pre-proposals in on 18 February 2019. The deadline for submitting full proposals will be on 17 June 2019.

- Pre-announcement: Personalised medicine: multidisciplinary research towards implementation - ERA PerMed will foster research and innovation activities building close linkages between basic biomedical research, clinical research, bioinformatics, epidemiology, socio-economic research, as well as research on the integration of personalised medicine into clinical practice and on ethical, legal and social implications. Proposals submitted under this call are expected to demonstrate the applicability of project outcomes into clinical practice as well as to describe the impact on the health care systems. Proposals must be interdisciplinary and clearly demonstrate the potential impact in personalised medicine as well as the added value of transnational collaboration.

The call is planned to be launched in January 2019 with a submission deadline for pre-proposals in March 2019. It is expected, that consortia invited for the full-proposal stage, will need to submit their proposal on June 17th, 2019.

- NEW: "Multinational research projects on Personalised Medicine for Neurodegenerative Diseases": the EU Joint Programme – Neurodegenerative Disease Research (JPND) initiative launched a joint transnational call for multinational research projects on personalised medicine for neurodegenerative diseases. The following neurodegenerative diseases are included in the call: Alzheimer's disease and other dementias; Parkinson's disease and PD‐related disorders; Prion diseases; Motor neuron diseases; Huntington's disease; Spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA); Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). Proposals have to include one or several of the following research areas:

• Diagnosis (e.g. biomarkers, imaging data, omics approaches, big data analyses);
• Prevention (e.g. biomarkers for studying novel treatments and interventions, co-morbidities, digital technologies, stratification within cohort studies and clinical trials);
• Care (e.g. improvement of social and health care systems, molecular profiling, imaging, lifestyle data).

The deadline for submitting pre-proposals is on 12 March 2019. The deadline for submitting full proposals will be on 25 June 2019.

-NEW: Pre-announcement: Blue Bioeconomy Cofund (BlueBio): BlueBio aims at achieving a sustainable and competitive Blue Bioeconomy in Europe. The goal is to generate knowledge for Blue Bioeconomy value chains and improve the transfer of bio-based products and services from research, innovation and demonstrations to production scale implementing the multi-actor-approach. Proposals must demonstrate industry involvement and target one of the following four priority areas: 

• Priority area 1: Exploring new bio-resources
• Priority area 2: Exploring improvements in fisheries and aquaculture
• Priority area 3: Exploring synergies across sectors
• Priority area 4: Exploring Biotechnology and ICT

Further information on eligibility and national co-funding is available in the call text document. Deadline for pre-proposals is 17 March. Note that a brokerage event is being held on 30 January in Lysaker. Registration is open until 28 January.

The European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP) is a public-public partnership between countries in Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, and the European Union which funds clinical research to accelerate the development of new or improved drugs, vaccines, microbicides and diagnostics. These are their coming calls:

• Preparatory Fellowships - Joint call with AREF - deadline 1 February 2019 
• Senior Fellowships - deadline 28 February 2019
• EDCTP Clinical Research and Product Development Fellowships - deadline 7 March 2019
• Clinical Research and Development Fellowships - deadline 7 March 2019

On the following page the UiB's local contact points are listed where every call has a responsible research advisor. You can contact them or faculty advisors MEDforsk@uib.no.

- First call in the Baltic Research Programme: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have decided to combine their respective EEA Grants research programmes into a joint Baltic Research Programme for cooperation with Norway. Proposals for collaborative research projects are invited in all areas of fundamental and applied sciences., and for this first round will need to be submitted by Estonian institutions. Norwegian research institutions can be partners in the project. Deadline: 31 January 2019.

- In 2003, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched Grand Challenges in Global Health, which came to include multiple funding partners. This initiative focused on 14 major scientific challenges that, if solved, could lead to key advances in preventing, treating, and curing diseases of the developing world.  Grand Challenges is a family of initiatives fostering innovation to solve key global health and development problems. The current topics are:

• Increasing Demand for Vaccination Services (Round 22)
• New Approaches for Manufacturing Gut Microbial Biotherapeutics (Round 22)
• Innovations Driving Programmatic Performance in Immunization: Service Experience and Data Use + Measurement (Round 22)
• Innovation for WASH in Urban Settings (Round 22)

- NEW: Extrastiftelsen: Announces calls for Health with deadline 15 March, and Research with deadline 1 June.

- The Fondation ARC (Cancer Research), France, is launching the 2019 edition of the "Tomorrow´s leader in oncology" call for projects. The aim of this program is to attract new talent scientist, proficient and leader in their field to France to install their research teams and develop the most innovative translational research projects in oncology.

The Fondation ARC considers this call for projects as a real partnership with the research structures and expects from them a significant investment in terms of resources and support for the candidate (premises, operating resources, technological environment in line with the achievement of the project…). In this edition, the ARC Foundation will devote up to 1.5 million euros over 5 years to support the installation of a researcher and his team, as well as the implementation of their research program. French research structures with a team implementation project will present acandidate and a complete scientific file.

The notice of the call for projects can be downloaded from the Fondation ARC website.

Deadline for application form duly completed must be submitted by 14 March 2019 at the latest.

You can send all your questions and request the application file to the following address: leaders@fondation‐arc.org (Contact: Sandrine Daubeuf and Thé Lachmann).

Please visit our web page dedicated to innovation relevant funding possibilities.

- EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization) Fellowships Research on the molecular mechanisms of life at all levels.

• Short-term Short-Term Fellowships fund research exchanges of up to three months between laboratories in eligible countries.
• Long-term The EMBO Long-Term Fellowships are awarded for a period of up to two years and support post-doctoral research visits to laboratories throughout Europe and the world. Deadline: throughout the year.