Research Grant Program

The A-T Children’s Project offers a unique research grant program aimed at supporting innovative studies related to ataxia telangiectasia (A-T). With a maximum budget of $75,000 per year for one or two years, they prioritize projects that provide clear pathways to therapies. The organization encourages novel ideas and collaborations, providing researchers access to valuable resources and expertise. They emphasize funding projects with high potential for practical relevance in treating A-T, making timely decisions on grant applications.

Research We Support
The A-T Children’s Project supports promising research with sound scientific rationale. No idea is too novel for us to consider, as long as it has clear relevance for people with ataxia telangiectasia (A-T) and the potential to lead to a therapy. We welcome applications from academia and industry scientists, small biotechnology and large pharmaceutical companies, and even from venture capital firms that are incubating new technologies which may hold promise for A-T. Our portfolio spans basic, translational and clinical research.
Open to Ideas
From time to time, we also encourage projects that address a specific gap in scientific understanding, patient need or therapeutic development. In addition, we sometimes provide add-on, supplemental funding if a grant we already awarded shows significant progress and continued potential.
Our grants come with more than money. We frequently guide researchers to research tools such as A-T animal models, cell-based assays, patient biospecimens and clinical datasets. We also help grant recipients connect with advisors who have been in the A-T field for a long time and with collaborators whose work may have synergies.
Our Current Focus
While the A-T Children’s Project has previously granted millions of dollars to support projects aimed at elucidating A-T biology, we are now focusing our limited funds on experiments whose success will provide a clear path to a treatment or intervention for A-T.
How Grant Decisions are Made
Grants are reviewed on a rolling basis and awarded quickly compared to most other grant-giving organizations. In most cases, a grant decision will be made and communicated to the applicant within 90 days after the grant is submitted. We use a two-tiered, peer-review selection process, and require applicants to submit a Letter of Intent prior to submission of a proposal.
Funding
Maximum total direct cost of $75,000 per year, for one or two years.

Eligibility

100% of the funding we provide to you must be used for the direct costs of your A-T-related project.Consistent with the urgency felt by all families impacted by this disease, the A-TCP’s current focus is on funding innovative research strategies that look at A-T in new ways and that include a clear “yes” or “no” answer to the hypotheses rather than merely defining a mechanism.We may occasionally support earlier-stage discovery research, but only if the results of those early-stage projects will clearly (a) reveal and accelerate a path to new treatments (such as validating a drug target) or (b) produce a tool or resource that will help accelerate the development of treatments (such as a viral vector that can carry the ATM gene, or a validated disease biomarker that can more quickly measure or predict the efficacy of treatments for the neurological problems of A-T).We do not care if your research is performed in an academic or industry setting. We care only about innovative, novel research approaches to A-T performed by rigorous scientists in a cost-effective way.

Ineligibility

Grants cannot be used for administrative, overhead, or indirect costs that your institution may want applied to this project.Because many governments, non-profits and companies worldwide already spend billions of dollars annually on cancer research – some of which is likely to benefit A-T patients – we are unlikely to award grants to applications proposing research on the role of the ATM protein in cancer or focused on strategies for treating cancer in A-T patients.Unfortunately, although we are wildly enthusiastic fans of good science, our small organization cannot afford to support researchers who simply want to use a popular methodology (such as making iPS cells from patients and then differentiating them into neuronal cells, or doing single-cell sequencing) in their lab, or who want us to fund their favorite area of focus around which they have built their career, if its relevance to A-T requires a real stretch of the imagination. We hope that you can appreciate our position on this.We may support the purchase of equipment that is critical for an A-T research project, but usually, we prefer to fund an investigator who works in a lab that already has the necessary equipment.As we are determined not to waste any of our donors’ hard-earned and generously given dollars, we do not usually pay for travel unless it will support collaborations necessary for the achievement of a proposal’s goals.We will fund neuroscience-related research proposals using Atm-/- mice as a model system only if the selected model has a clear, obvious neurological phenotype.We will not fund any additional researchers eager to make iPS cell lines derived from A-T patient cells or by disrupting the ATM gene in normal or carrier cells. This work has been performed many times.