“Last year, U.S. researchers received about 42,500 pieces of bad news from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Their grant proposal had been rejected; they wouldn’t be receiving a piece of the agency’s roughly $30 billion federal funding pie. For many, the next step is to cast around for slices of smaller pies—grants from nonprofit disease foundations or investments from private companies that might keep their projects alive.
Now, a new program aims to play matchmaker between these researchers and second-chance funders. The Online Partnership to Accelerate Research (OnPAR), a collaboration between NIH and the defense, engineering, and health contractor Leidos, lets researchers upload rejected NIH proposals to an online portal where potential funders can review the scores received from reviewers, and decide whether to put up cash.”