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NIHR Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation Programme (EME) – Latest funding opportunities

  Tuesday, 06 Dec 2022 | Funding Deadline

The Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation (EME) Programme funds ambitious studies evaluating interventions with potential to make a step-change in the promotion of health, treatment of disease and improvement of rehabilitation or long-term care. Within these studies, EME supports research in the mechanisms of diseases and treatments. EME is a partnership between the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the NIHR.

The EME Programme is accepting stage 1 applications to the following funding opportunities:

22/108 Pain management for children and young people (0-19 years)
Areas of interest for the EME Programme include, but are not limited to:

  • Pharmacological treatments used in short and long-term pain management.
  • Pharmacological management of neuropathic pain.
  • Repurposing treatments for cancer-related pain.
  • Management of migraine.
  • Pain management in children with life-limiting conditions.
  • Pain management in children with comorbidities and complex needs, including at the end of life.

22/109 NIHR NICE rolling call
The programme is interested in receiving applications to meet recommendations in research identified in NICE guidance that has been published or updated since 2015. Proposals must be within the remit of the EME Programme and the primary outcome measure must be health related. (This call is also open in the Public Health Research, Health and Social Care Delivery Research and Health Technology Assessment programmes for proposals which fall within the remit of those programmes).

22/105 NIHR James Lind Alliance Priority Setting Partnerships rolling call
The JLA Priority Setting Partnerships facilitate patients, carers and clinicians to work collaboratively to identify research priorities in particular areas of health and care. Their aim is to ensure that health research funders are aware of the issues that are important to the people who need to use the research in their daily lives. The EME programme recognises the importance of the research priorities identified by the James Lind Alliance (JLA) Priority Setting Partnerships (PSP) and are interested in receiving high-quality applications which address them.

22/107 Motor neurone disease highlight notice
This NIHR highlight notice invites proposals for Motor Neurone Disease research to address important health and social care questions. The NIHR is inviting research proposals that seek to develop the critical underlying infrastructure to accelerate progress in and learning from MND clinical trials. This will build on existing initiatives, networks and collaborations that capitalise on recent progress in drug development, to improve trial design and participation, validate new patient relevant outcomes and validate identified clinical biomarkers that are known to correlate to a clinical endpoint.

22/106 Delivering a sustainable health and care system
The EME Programme are accepting stage 1 applications to this NIHR Themed Call for research into the evaluation of interventions or services to support the delivery of a more sustainable UK health and care system, including mitigating the effects of climate change on health and care delivery. A number of NIHR research programmes are participating in this themed call.

NIHR Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation Programme – Researcher-led workstream
The EME Programme is accepting stage 1 applications to their researcher-led workstream. Applications are sought for research into the efficacy and/or mechanism of interventions that are based in or used by the National Health Service (NHS) and its partners. The researcher-led workstream includes:

  • Efficacy studies - These aim to evaluate the efficacy of a wide range of interventions, where there is some human ‘proof-of-concept’, i.e. a signal that the technology may work.
  • Mechanistic studies - These aim to test hypotheses around the mechanism of action of an intervention, making use of patients, data or samples from other studies.
  • Combined Efficacy and Mechanistic studies, which both evaluate a intervention and test hypotheses around its mechanism of action within the same study.

Deadline for proposals: 6 December 2022