Date Posted: March 17, 2021

Updated April 7, 2021

Image of a hand holding flowers.NIH recently announced its intent to publish two funding opportunities to establish the Accelerating Medicines Partnership: Autoimmune and Immune-Mediated Diseases (AMP AIM) program. AMP AIM will deepen the current understanding of autoimmune diseases—such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, psoriatic spectrum diseases, and Sjögren’s syndrome—which afflict more than 25 million Americans. These diseases can cause profound abnormalities in immune responses and can result in persistent damage to multiple tissues and organ systems. 

AMP programs are public‒private partnerships between NIH and nonprofit organizations and pharmaceutical companies that generate pre-competitive, disease-specific data that will be publicly accessible by the biomedical community for further research. AMP AIM will build on the 6 years of progress realized by its predecessor program, AMP RA/SLE (rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus). AMP RA/SLE brought together public and private communities to make unprecedented progress in understanding the cell populations and pathways that drive these diseases and establishing a knowledge base for potential treatments. AMP AIM will analyze how innate and adaptive cells of the immune system and tissue-resident cells together cause inflammation, abnormal function, tissue injury, and clinical disease. AMP AIM organizers hope to develop a comprehensive and integrated understanding of these disease pathways to identify targets for intervention.

The AMP AIM network will consist of four distinct, highly interactive, and complementary components: 

  1. Disease Teams (DTs). Each DT will lead the development of the research agenda and research priorities for one disease (rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, psoriatic spectrum diseases, or Sjögren’s syndrome). DTs will identify critical opportunities and select, recruit, and deep phenotype the most informative patient populations for the AMP AIM program. Individual DTs will work together with the TACs (see below) to analyze tissue and other biospecimens. For more information, see NOT-AR-21-013.
  2. Technology and Analytics Cores (TACs). TACs will test, optimize, and apply innovative technologies to interrogate and analyze human biopsy tissue and biosamples. For more information, see NOT-AR-21-014
  3. Research Management Unit (RMU). The RMU will provide centralized management and operational support to the network, including providing and/or overseeing clinical monitoring for the entire AMP AIM program. For more information, see NOT-AR-21-014
  4. Knowledge Portal (KP). The KP will provide an interface for storage, analysis aggregation, and visualization of all data generated by the DTs and TACs.

AMP AIM is supported by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR), and ORWH. You can find more information on these funding opportunities by clicking the links above. These funding opportunities support only human studies.

 

Update. On March 31, 2021, NIH posted RFA-AR-21-015 and RFA-AR-21-016

Relevant dates for these funding opportunities are as follows:

  • Informational webinar for applicants: May 5, 2021, 12:00–2:00 p.m. ET
  • Letters of intent due: June 15, 2021
  • Applications accepted: June 15–July 15, 2021

You can read more on these funding opportunities and the upcoming webinar here and by clicking the links above.