Targeted Call - Research Awards 2025

Targeted Call Research Awards 2025

Applications are invited for grants to be awarded in 2025 by Crohn’s & Colitis UK. Grants up to a maximum of £150,000 for up to three years are available to fund research into Crohn’s Disease, Ulcerative Colitis, or other types of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD).

This year, we would like to receive proposals which address one of the specified James Lind Alliance Priorities for IBD listed below. These are areas of importance to people living with IBD, which have not received significant attention to date and where there is still room for progress to be made. Applications for funding of pilot and feasibility studies are also welcome, and PhD student stipends and fees are eligible.  Unfortunately, we will not be able to consider applications that do not directly address any of the specified priorities.

The priorities we are interested in are:

• JLA Priority 2: What are the optimal markers/ combinations of markers (clinical, endoscopic, imaging, genetics, other biomarkers) for stratification of patients with regards to a) disease course and b) monitoring disease activity and c) treatment response?
• JLA Priority 5: What is an optimal treatment strategy for perianal Crohn’s Disease and what individual factors determine this?
• JLA Priority 6: What is the best treatment for controlling diarrhoea and/or incontinence symptoms in people with IBD, including novel pharmacological and non-pharmacological options? Is high-dose Loperamide safe and effective in the treatment of diarrhoea in IBD?
• JLA Priority 8: What is the association between IBD and fatigue and how should it be managed?
• JLA Priority 9: Does early surgery or later surgery for terminal ileal Crohn’s disease result in better outcomes (quality of life, cost-effectiveness)?

More information on how to submit an application will be available soon. We estimate the deadline for outline applications will be mid-March 2025.

For further information, please follow the links below:

• Amount of funding available
• Eligibility
• How to apply
• Timeline
• Assessment criteria
• Plain English summary review
• Research Grant Terms and Conditions
• Other grant round guidance and documents

Amount of funding available

Funding for any one project will not exceed £150,000 in total over a maximum period of three years. 

The Charity will consider smaller or innovative projects, including feasibility and pilot studies, as well as mainstream research.

Crohn’s & Colitis UK Research Awards can cover direct costs of the research.  This includes costs of materials, laboratory services, expenses and staff specifically employed in the research, including PhD stipends and fees. Any salary costs for the Principal Investigator, or other directly allocated salary costs, must be fully justified within the application. 

You can apply for funds to cover the cost of purchasing equipment (but not costs associated with maintenance of equipment) on the grant, but these must be specific to the project. We will not, for example, cover the costs of generic lab equipment such as fridges or freezers unless required specifically for the purposes of the project being applied for – this must be clearly justified in the grant application.  In addition, we will not consider grants where the item of equipment represents a significant portion of the grant costs. Budget requests must be fully justified in the full application.

You may include any consumables and laboratory materials directly attributable to the project including animal costs and access charges to shared equipment facilities (e.g. microscopes, flow cytometers, mass spectrometers).  You can also include costs for consultancy and statistician advice.

The Charity will not pay for:

• Estates costs
• Equipment maintenance or running costs.
• Staff recruitment costs
• Standard office equipment (e.g. laptops, printers etc.)
• Apprenticeship levy
• Organisational overheads (e.g. rent, heating, administrative support etc.) and other indirect costs

Please note that once awarded, whilst changes within the budget can be agreed in the light of the project’s development or national pay awards, costs additional to your original budget cannot be agreed without a further grant application through an active funding call.

In calculating staff costs, please ensure that you have allowed the appropriate amounts for any increments due and for any Employers' National Insurance or Pension Scheme costs.  You should include an estimate for pay awards in second or subsequent years and state the percentage increase you have assumed in the item description.  Pay awards cannot be added to the budget once the award has been made. 

At the outline application stage, we are only looking for summarised, top line costings.  If you are asked to submit a full application for Stage Two you will be expected to produce a full, detailed budget.  We anticipate there may be some changes to budget lines between Stages One and Two but would not expect to see the budget completely change without prior discussion with the charity.

Eligibility

Applicants must be based at a UK-based university, research institute or NHS setting.  We cannot accept applications from commercial organisations at this time.

Please note that whilst we would consider funding studies involving international collaboration, the Principal Investigator and Host Institution must be based in the UK.

How to apply

Applications to the 2025 grant round will be assessed via a two-stage process. Please note – this process has recently changed as we have now implemented the use of a grants management system, Flexigrant. If you have applied to us before, please ensure you have read the guidance fully so you are aware of the new process. 

Stage 1: Submit an outline application form on Flexigrant. Further guidance on how to do this will be available in due course. We estimate the deadline for outline applications will be mid-March 2025.

Stage 2: Shortlisted applicants will be invited to complete a full application via Flexigrant for peer review. We estimate the deadline for outline applications will be mid-June 2025.

We anticipate letting applicants know the outcome of the Stage 2 review in November 2025.  Please ensure your expected start date is not before 1 December 2025 as this will be the earliest date your project is likely to be able to start. Projects are unable to commence before signed Terms and Conditions have been returned to Crohn’s & Colitis UK.

Timeline

We anticipate letting applicants know the outcome of Stage 1 in early April. Successful applicants will be invited to submit a full application. You may be asked to take into account feedback from the Committee when writing the full application. 

Assessment criteria

There are both scientific/clinical reviewers on the panel and lived experience reviewers.  They have different roles on the panel and will assess your outline application accordingly. 

We expect all applicants to have considered patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) and equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in their proposed work. Any involvement should be proportionate to the type of study being proposed. For example we would expect a laboratory-based study to have less involvement overall than a clinical study that will be recruiting patients. We expect all studies, however, to have consulted people living with the condition.

Applications that fail to embed PPIE and EDI adequately in the proposed work will not be shortlisted and invited to submit a full application, irrespective of the strength of the rest of the application.

Details of the assessment criteria at Stage One (outline applications) can be found here. For Stage Two (full applications), you can find the assessment criteria here.

Plain English Summary Review

For those applicants who have been Shortlisted at Stage One and invited to submit a full application, we are delighted to offer the opportunity to have your plain English summary reviewed. Members of our community living with Crohn's and Colitis, will provide feedback on readability and ease of understanding, before you submit your Stage Two application. If you are interested in receiving feedback on your plain English summary, please get in touch with us at research@crohnsandcolitis.org.uk