CIHR and NSERC boost funding for cutting-edge research with commercial potential

Efforts to accelerate the exploitation of health-related technologies through multi-agency collaboration are receiving a major boost with the doubling of funding for the next competition of the Collaborative Health Research Projects (CHRP) program. Jointly managed by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the program has received several modifications including a mandatory requirement for an end user for each project.

Most recently, it has engaged with the National Research Council (NRC) to support a dedicated $9-million funding envelope for medical resonance and photonics applications used in medical imaging.

CRHP was launched by NSERC in 1999 and expanded to include CIHR as a collaborative partner in 2003, growing in size and significance in subsequent years as the pace of convergence between the health, natural sciences and engineering technologies accelerates, particularly in the area of medical devices. For the current competition — including the NRC component — funding has been boosted to $26 million from just $13.8 million for the 2010 competition, which recently announced 34 projects at 17 institutions.

"This is a huge jump for the program. We're sending a strong signal … This is really the centreface between our two mandates," says CIHR president Dr Alain Beaudet. "It's now mandatory to include a technology or knowledge user which could be industry or a hospital or a health charity with the capacity to integrate the new knowledge into the system."

Interdisciplinary research is becoming increasingly critical in the development and exploitation of nanotechnology, lasers, photonics, microfluidics, telemetry and surgical techniques, many of which are computer assisted.

special component with NRC participation

Diagnostic imaging technologies are the focus of an ever wider collaboration involving NRC and the Business Development Bank of Canada. A workshop held in late 2010 demonstrated that Canadian research in the field is globally competitive but that gaps remained in some areas which all parties agreed to address. NRC contributed $3 million to the initiative, while CIHR and NSERC allocated $1.5 million each from their contributions to the CHRP envelope, matched by both parties with new funding for a total of $89 million.

The medical imaging component of CHRP will target larger-scale projects of at least $1 million annually over two years. At least one NRC institute must be involved in a project and NRC funding only applies to the involvement of its own personnel and/or equipment. "Industry must also be involved either in the R&D or as a potential receptor within three years. This has the potential to reduce the cost of health care," says Beaudet.

The recently concluded competition attracted 300 applicants and yielded a 30% success rate based on the full proposals submitted. Beaudet says the current expanded competition drew 500 applicants and will likely produce a similar success rate, adding that letters of intent will be even more rigorously assessed to ensure that applying researchers have a fair chance of success.

While Beaudet acknowledges that the base budgets of CIHR and NSERC are not increasing as rapidly as in previous years, the collaborative nature of CHRP is not seen as a way to conserve scarce resources.

"This program uses an integrated know-ledge translation approach. It's a smart strategy and there's a commonality of views at the top (of both organizations)," he says. "It works the interface of our mandate in information technology, robotics, cell and tissue engineering and imaging. These technologies are the future of medical research."

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