By Amarpreet Grewal

Last week, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research announced the results of the first funding competition since the major restructuring of their spending strategy in 2015. The biggest change was the creation of two funding streams: the CIHR Project Grant and the CIHR Foundation Grant, which have replaced the agency’s suite of 12 large and small funding awards.

The Foundation Grant supports research leaders from all career stages to build and conduct programs of health research across CIHR’s mandate. As the name suggests, the Foundation Grant is designed to provide long-term support for health researcher leaders. The majority of grants range between $50,000 and $1.5 million per year over 5 to 7 years depending on the researcher’s seniority and history.

The Project Grant is designed to capture ideas that will contribute to the creation and use of health-related knowledge. It supports a variety of health-related research and knowledge translation projects from discovery to application, including commercialization. This grant ranges between $50,000 and $750,000 per year for the grant durations of 1 to 5 years.

Congratulations to the two CBR members who have received the CIHR Foundation Grant:

	Dr. Christian Kastrup: “Materials and Mechanisms for Understanding and Controlling Hemorrhage”
	Dr. Christopher Overall: “From Proteolytic Networks to Human Biology and Disease: Protease regulation of signal transduction in chronic inflammatory diseases”

Congratulations to the four CBR members who received the CIHR Project Grants:

	Dr. Robert Hancock: “The network biology of stem cell derived macrophages: Deciphering the role of cellular reprogramming in sepsis”
	Dr. Wilfred Jefferies: “Studies on novel immune-surveillance mechanisms underlying cancer elimination”
	Dr. Jayachandhran Kizhakkedathu: “Novel One-step Approach to a Universal Anti-adhesion Coating to Prevent Catheter-associated Urinary Tract Infections”
	Dr. Kelly Mcnagny: “Innate Lymphoid cells and RAR-related orphan receptor alpha (RORa) as therapeutic targets for gastrointestinal fibrosis and Crohn’s disease”