Purpose.

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) issued by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH), solicits grant applications proposing exceptionally innovative, high risk, original and/or unconventional exploratory research projects focused on the inception

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and early stage development of highly innovative cancer-relevant technologies for biospecimen science.

The overall goal is to develop and evaluate technologies capable of interrogating or maximizing the quality and utility of biospecimens for molecular analyses with minimal invasiveness or compromise to donor/patient health.

This FOA will also support the development of tools, devices, instrumentation, and associated methods to assess sample quality, preserve/protect sample integrity, and establish verification criteria for quality assessment/quality control and handling under diverse conditions.

Projects must clearly demonstrate potential to produce a major impact in the area of biospecimen science.

This funding opportunity is part of a broader NCI-sponsored Innovative Molecular Analysis Technologies (IMAT) Program.

Several IMAT FOAs of identical or closely related scientific scope using various funding mechanisms are available.

To facilitate selection, a separate Notice in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts provides brief cross-comparison and links to all the IMAT FOAs.

See NOT-CA-09-00 7.