Expanding the Target Landscape by Drugging the Undruggable (R21 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
National Institutes of Health (NIH) · NIH Institute/Center · PAR-25-442
Source: Grants.gov · View original posting ↗
- AwardWhat a single award can be worth — the funder's published per-award amount or floor–ceiling range.
- Amount not listed
- DeadlineFinal application due date.
- Feb 17, 2028
- Letter of intentDue date for the letter of intent (a short pre-application some funders require or request before the full proposal).
- —
- MechanismNIH activity code — the grant type (R01 research project, R21 exploratory, K series career development, F series fellowship, …).
- R21
- DurationMaximum project period for a single award.
- —
- Expected awardsHow many awards the funder anticipates making under this opportunity.
- —
- Funding cycleHow often the program accepts applications (annual, multiple cycles per year, rolling, or one-time).
- Standard NIH dates
- Open dateWhen applications open (or opened).
- Jun 17, 2025
- Total fundingThe overall pool the funder expects to commit across ALL awards under this opportunity — not what one project receives.
- —
- Clinical trialWhether proposed projects must, may, or must not include a clinical trial.
- Not allowed
Funding context
Based on FY2024 NIH (all institutes) R21 applications (1,837 of 11,592 applications awarded).
Institute-specific data wasn’t available — showing the NIH-wide rate for this mechanism.
Payline: NIH discontinued percentile paylines for 2026 under its Unified Funding Strategy ↗ — scores are now weighed in context rather than against a fixed cutoff.
NIH-wide R21, all institutes.
Aggregate historical data by institute, mechanism, and fiscal year — context for planning, not a prediction for this opportunity. Source ↗
Research areas
Auto-classified from the title and description (keyword-based) — may be imperfect.
Description
The purpose of this Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) is to solicit applications for exploratory and early-stage projects that focus on undruggable target classes within intractable human disease. Applicants will identify a human disease relevant undruggable target class and develop a method or agent that is selective for one or more targets within that target class. This NOFO is intended to jumpstart research that demonstrates innovative strategies to modulate targets that cannot be addressed by established therapeutic types, furthering the development of methods and/or agents selective for undruggable target classes.
Data notes: award amount not published in the source feed; administering NIH institute could not be identified from the opportunity number.