Request for Letters of Intent: Experimental Human Biology

Stanford University’s Innovative Medicines Accelerator (IMA) aims to accelerate the prototyping of innovative medicines and vaccines, and to enable hypothesis-driven studies in human subjects. The purpose of this request for letters of intent (LOI) is to leverage capacity and infrastructure at Stanford to address unmet medical needs through human subject research. Through this solicitation, the IMA seeks to support research projects aimed at testing hypotheses in human subjects that, if validated, have the potential to pave the road to new medicines, vaccines and diagnostics or to enhanced clinical use of existing ones. Competitive projects will have a strong mechanistic basis or empirical rationale and will utilize the Stanford School of Medicine Clinical and Translational Research Unit (CTRU), where patients can be safely tested and/or treated. Of particular interest are proposals that seek to:

• Use clinically available disease management tools (e.g., drugs, diagnostics, imaging tools) to validate a new drug target in patients; 
• Verify the potential of a biomarker to substantially reduce the size and/or duration of Phase 2 clinical trials for an unmet medical need; 
• Evaluate the efficacy of an approved/investigational drug in an orphan/neglected disease;
• Evaluate the utility of an approved molecular imaging tool in a secondary indication; or
• Undertake a high-content analysis of an approved vaccine in healthy volunteers. 
• Evaluate safety of an investigational drug in healthy volunteers

Research on any indication, therapy, or disease including SARS-CoV2 or COVID-19 is eligible for support through this mechanism.