The following are three National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding opportunities that may be of interest to researchers working toward a treatment and cure for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a deadly crippler and the number-one inherited genetic cause of infant death.

Exceptional, Unconventional Research Enabling Knowledge Acceleration (EUREKA) (R01)
Application Due Date: October 21, 2010
Solicits proposals for exceptionally innovative research on novel hypotheses or difficult problems, solutions to which would have an extremely high impact on biomedical or biobehavioral research. Support may be requested for up to $800,000 in direct costs (excluding consortium F&A) over a four-year period, not exceeding $250,000 (direct costs, excluding consortium F&A) in any one year. (Note, that over the last three years the EUREKA mechanism has had a success rate much more in line with standard R01 applications. Each of these offers an opportunity not as easily addressed in regular NIH funding mechanisms.)

NIH Common Fund Transformative Research Projects Program (R01)
Application Due Date(s): October 27, 2010
Solicits applications proposing groundbreaking, exceptionally innovative, high risk, original and/or unconventional research with the potential to create new scientific paradigms or challenge existing ones. Budget requests should be commensurate with project needs for up to a five-year project period. Up to one third of the budget for this FOA will be reserved projects exceeding $1 million dollars in direct costs.

Scalable Assays for Unbiased Analysis of Neurobiological Function (R01)
Application Due Date: November 17, 2010
Solicits applications to develop novel, robust analytical platforms using in vitro assays to reveal changes in neuronal and/or glial function. The goal is to adapt state-of-the-art measures of basic cellular processes or molecular events that are key mediators of brain function with the intent to probe mechanisms and/or perturbations in an unbiased and efficient manner. The novel assay platforms would provide opportunities to measure neurobiological endpoints and build a pipeline to be used in the context of target identification and drug discovery.