Tips for Successful Grants
01/09/10 19:15 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Submitted by S. Pelech - Kinexus on Wed, 09/01/2010 - 19:15.
To get successfully grant funded, I have observed that the following strategy seems to work quite well:
1. Do the proposed research first! But don't mention this in the application. Just state that you have very preliminary research in strong support of the proposal.
2. Come up with an angle where by some kind of hypothesis is being tested. Ideally it should be very simple. You don't want to confuse the reviewers. Under no circumstances ever mention discovery-based research.
3. Rationalize that the proposed research will provide an insight into the diagnosis or treatment of a human disease. Obscure and rare diseases are fine.
3. Propose to do the work in a very simple model organism. Yeast, the fruit fly or the nematode worm are the best. This will usually appeal to a few people on the grant panel.
4. Whatever the problem is, a molecular biology strategy has to be the best. Make sure that some sort of genetic approach with mutants is being used. Try to highlight the use of RNAsi's or micro-RNA's to show that you are keeping up with the times.
5. Focus on just one or a few proteins, oops I means genes, in the project description. You don't want it to look like your fishing. I recommend that one of the genes encodes a protein kinase as it could be argued to be a drug target.
6. For future studies, mention that you intend to knock out or in the gene of interest in a mouse model after you have completed the proposed work.
Good luck, because no matter what you write, you will need this too.
Link to the original blog post.
To get successfully grant funded, I have observed that the following strategy seems to work quite well:
1. Do the proposed research first! But don't mention this in the application. Just state that you have very preliminary research in strong support of the proposal.
2. Come up with an angle where by some kind of hypothesis is being tested. Ideally it should be very simple. You don't want to confuse the reviewers. Under no circumstances ever mention discovery-based research.
3. Rationalize that the proposed research will provide an insight into the diagnosis or treatment of a human disease. Obscure and rare diseases are fine.
3. Propose to do the work in a very simple model organism. Yeast, the fruit fly or the nematode worm are the best. This will usually appeal to a few people on the grant panel.
4. Whatever the problem is, a molecular biology strategy has to be the best. Make sure that some sort of genetic approach with mutants is being used. Try to highlight the use of RNAsi's or micro-RNA's to show that you are keeping up with the times.
5. Focus on just one or a few proteins, oops I means genes, in the project description. You don't want it to look like your fishing. I recommend that one of the genes encodes a protein kinase as it could be argued to be a drug target.
6. For future studies, mention that you intend to knock out or in the gene of interest in a mouse model after you have completed the proposed work.
Good luck, because no matter what you write, you will need this too.
Link to the original blog post.