NIH intends to publish a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) to solicit applications that will develop, validate and demonstrate the utility of advanced 3-D tissue models for testing the efficacy of various therapeutic modalities, including small molecules and biologics and accelerate the discovery and development of new therapeutics across different diseases.

The initiative will develop advanced 3-D drug screening models adaptable to high throughput assays. These non-animal models are expected to mimic structural, biochemical and mechanical properties of tissue that are representative of a drug’s behavior in a body, resulting in improved predictive accuracy. This is an expansion upon the work conducted under previous NOFOs, RFA-TR-17-007, RFA-TR-19-020 and RFA-TR-21-015, that have focused on development of 3-D skin and other tissue models for drug screening. The applicants are required to utilize the 3-D modeling/drug screening expertise and infrastructure available at the NCATS 3-D Bioprinting laboratory. 3-D tissue models in a well-based drug screening platform should be as complex as necessary to achieve physiological/pharmacological relevance, and as simple as possible to make the models robust, reliable and amenable to drug screening. Grant authorities that allow NCATS to forecast this opportunity are as follows: 42 U.S. Code § 287a - Cures Acceleration Network.

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