Funding | Sustained Viral Resilience

Funding – now closed

We’re looking to fund a diversity of approaches in order to foster a vibrant research community and maximise collective progress toward the programmatic goals. We intend to fund approaches to engineering the innate immune system to create what we’re calling sustained innate immunoprophylactics (SIIPs), as well as activities that develop methods to accelerate adoption of SIIP candidates, and research that facilitates future translation and commercialisation of SIIPs.

We’re primarily seeking applications from those whose work involves newer approaches or radical — as opposed to incremental — advances from existing approaches. We don’t require preliminary data, but encourage you to provide in detail your reasoned basis for expected success.

Technical areas

We’ll fund ambitious projects across the following Technical Areas (TAs):

TA1 | Explorers: Focused on providing proof-of-concept evidence that sustained innate immunoprophylactics (SIIPs) are possible by designing, building and testing candidates in in vitro and in vivo models.

TA2 | Accelerators: Focused on developing tools, platforms, models, standards, or datasets in order to accelerate the process of bringing new SIIP candidates to strong proof-of-concept.

TA3 | Translators: Focused on conducting research that facilitates the clinical translation and future commercialisation of SIIPs, ultimately smoothing the pathway from technical proof-of-concept to real-world impact.

Learn more about funding for this programme in the resources below.

Resources

Call for proposals [PDF - 694.75Kb]Call for proposals (accessible version) [PDF - 640.08Kb]Webinar replayWebinar FAQs [PDF - 234.76Kb]Accessibility support

Clarification questions

If you have any questions, please use the chat function on this page for the quickest response – you'll find the icon in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen. It can guide you to the right information or connect you with the ARIA team if needed. We’ll update this page regularly with questions and answers.

Nb: Clarification questions that need to be reviewed by the ARIA team should be submitted via the chat function no later than 4 days prior to the relevant deadline date. Clarification questions received after this date will not be reviewed.

Questions + answers

The following question(s) (included here in a generalised form) have been received and we are publishing the answer(s) as they may contain information that is relevant to other applicants.

Proposals may include testing against animal viruses where there is justification to do so, but this should not excessively divert resources or focus from human respiratory viruses.

For example, supplementary in vitro testing against animal viruses is more feasible than in vivo testing, as the former requires fewer additional resources to screen an extra virus. Similarly, testing against existing well-developed animal models is less resource-heavy compared to developing entirely new models.
We expect most applicants to primarily identify either as an Explorer, Accelerator, or Translator. Explorer-based projects may choose to incorporate translation activities, but that doesn't make them a Translator necessarily – Translators are creating new resources for clinical translation/commercialisation across the SIIP development ecosystem as a whole, rather than tied to any particular project or approach.

If you have independent projects that address multiple TAs, you should submit multiple independent applications. If you think a single project spans multiple TAs, please indicate this in your application.
We believe more systematic projects will be more enabling of SIIP community establishment and development. As a result, projects that take a systematic approach in a way that can inform the entire field rather than advancing individual candidates are more likely to be competitive in this programme.
A focus on respiratory viral pathogens is highly preferable for this programme.
Weekly administrations over the course of 3 months would not be preferable; a single dose or small series of "priming" doses is what is meant by "a single course of administration."