Hereditary Disease Foundation: Transformative Research Award Grant

The Hereditary Disease Foundation's Transformative Research Award aims to fund innovative projects that advance research on Huntington's disease. With annual funding ranging from $300,000 to $500,000, the program encourages collaborative teams to explore new disease mechanisms and therapies. Proposals must demonstrate exceptional novelty and a clear path to impactful outcomes, focusing on discovering disease-modifying targets and applying novel tools. This initiative seeks to stimulate groundbreaking advances in understanding and treating Huntington's disease.

The Hereditary Disease Foundation funds the most promising, innovative and paradigm-changing research to cure Huntington’s disease.
Huntington's disease is a genetic brain disorder causing irreversible declines in control of mood, memory, and movement. Currently there is no treatment or cure. Each child of an affected parent has a 50% risk of inheriting the disease. HD is caused by a single gene and serves as a model to potentially unlock cures for other brain disorders such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and Lou Gehrig’s (ALS) diseases.
The HDF Transformative Research Award program developed by the Hereditary Disease Foundation will make funds available to advance transformational collaborative projects that will provide new insights into disease mechanisms or create or implement tools and technologies not previously applied to Huntington's disease (HD) research for the advancement of therapeutics.
Request for Proposals
The program seeks to fund collaborative research teams to create innovative ways to study new pathogenic disease mechanisms and treatment modalities in Huntington’s disease. Funded projects will “significantly move the needle” and provide transformational new insights to the HD field. General areas include but are not limited to: whether modulation of somatic repeat instability is disease modifying, whether and how cellular, biochemical or molecular insights in HD systems are predictive of disease, or how to apply unexplored therapeutics for clinical application (inclusive of biomarkers). Projects that discover disease modifying targets and incorporate novel tools or technologies are encouraged. Projects must justify how results could ultimately connect to therapies.
Objectives: Stimulating Revolutionary Advances
The HDF Transformative Research Award program is intended to stimulate revolutionary advances in discovering fundamental new disease mechanisms or conceptually novel therapeutic approaches. Exceptional novelty with a credible research path toward the envisioned outcome that will impact HD research or HD therapies will be the most important factor in funding decisions. Incremental  advances on research already described in the literature are excluded. This funding opportunity is exclusively to develop and test new ideas.
Proposers are expected to establish their own metrics and milestones to measure success and to provide justification for their choice of metrics. Progress metrics must be delineated.
Funding
Annual funding can range from $300,000-500,000 per award per year with appropriate justification for up to a two-year period.

Eligibility

Investigators from academic institutions, companies, national laboratories, nonprofit institutes, and multi-institutional teams are welcome to apply.Use of FundsFunding can be used for principal investigator, co-investigator, staff scientists, postdoctoral researchers and, where applicable, graduate students’ salaries. Also allowed are costs for relevant laboratory supplies, open access publication fees, small laboratory equipment, and vivarium expenses. Institutional indirect support will be capped at 15% of direct costs.