DoD Prostate Cancer, Implementation Science Award | HT942524PCRPISA

Opportunity Information: Apply for HT942524PCRPISA

The FY24 DoD Prostate Cancer Research Program (PCRP) Implementation Science Award is designed to move proven prostate cancer interventions out of journals and into routine use, closing the gap between research, day-to-day clinical practice, community settings, and policy. The central idea is implementation science: studying and testing practical strategies, workflows, and tools that help health systems and communities reliably adopt evidence-based approaches, so that more patients are reached and outcomes improve. The program emphasizes real-world use, meaning proposals should focus on how an intervention, guideline, tool, or policy actually gets implemented, scaled, and sustained in the settings where people receive care or support.

This award is aimed at projects with major near-term impact, specifically those that could speed up widespread adoption of evidence-based practices across prostate cancer prevention, care, and survivorship. Applications are expected to clearly define who benefits, such as specific groups of prostate cancer patients, survivors, or at-risk individuals, and to explain why these groups are the right target for the proposed implementation work. A key requirement is a detailed research transition plan that lays out how findings will move beyond the study and into the next phase toward broad clinical impact. Transition planning is expected to be concrete and may include strategies at multiple levels, such as patient-focused approaches (education, navigation, adherence supports), provider-focused approaches (training, decision support, guideline uptake), community-level approaches (partnerships, outreach channels), and health system or policy approaches (workflow redesign, reimbursement levers, institutional policies).

Community engagement is not optional in this mechanism; it is built into how projects must be developed and run. Teams are required to include one or more prostate cancer consumer advocates and/or community members who are meaningfully involved throughout the project, not brought in only for periodic meetings. These partners should help shape the research question, study design, recruitment and retention plans, oversight, interpretation of results, and dissemination of outcomes. The engagement model is expected to be frequent and two-way, with community input influencing decisions in real time. Consumer advocates may be people diagnosed with prostate cancer, caregivers, or other representatives of the targeted community who can help drive behavior change or system change based on the project outcomes, and they should be sufficiently informed about current prostate cancer issues or positioned to make an impact in the community.

Across all topics, the program strongly encourages applicants to address health equity, including access to evidence-based care, and to focus on populations that are disproportionately affected by prostate cancer or by gaps in the cancer care continuum. While a project does not have to be exclusively a disparity-focused study, proposals are expected to seriously consider whether the implementation problem, setting, or target population includes inequities that can be reduced through better adoption of proven practices.

The research scope is intentionally broad, as long as the work fits implementation science and is positioned for practical deployment. Supported study types may include small-scale clinical trials up to Phase 2 when they are explicitly designed with implementation and reporting strategies that shorten the research-to-practice timeline, particularly for survivor care and for disproportionately affected groups. Other examples include behavioral or lifestyle interventions at the patient, provider, community, or policy level; comparative effectiveness research in real-world settings that clarifies benefits and harms of interventions or strategies used to prevent, diagnose, treat, or monitor relevant conditions; and projects that develop and test strategies to overcome barriers to access across the cancer care continuum. The mechanism also supports work focused on adoption, adaptation, integration, scale-up, and long-term sustainability of evidence-based interventions, guidelines, tools, and policies.

Applicants must include preliminary data that support scientific rationale and feasibility. The preliminary evidence does not need to come solely from prostate cancer studies, but the program encourages additional data that strengthens the case that the idea is clinically relevant to prostate cancer populations. For applicants proposing a clinical trial, the opportunity encourages leveraging the PCRP Prostate Cancer Clinical Trials Consortium (PCCTC) to speed initiation and completion. At the same time, some types of projects are explicitly outside the intent of the award, including correlative studies tied to ongoing clinical trials and preclinical animal studies.

The funding opportunity includes a Partnering Principal Investigator option to support genuine collaboration between two investigators with complementary contributions. One is designated the Initiating PI (handling most submission administration) and the other as the Partnering PI, and if funded, each PI is named on separate awards to their organization(s) with separate reporting and administrative requirements. The announcement also highlights broader priorities and collaborative opportunities, including alignment with recommendations from the congressionally mandated Metastatic Cancer Task Force when relevant to the PCRP priorities, and encouragement for innovative nuclear medicine and related techniques that could improve early diagnosis and targeted treatment, including relevance to active duty Service Members and their families. Multidisciplinary partnerships among academia, industry, the military services, the VA, and other federal agencies are encouraged, especially when they provide access to unique populations, infrastructure, or datasets; proposals relying on such resources need to document access at submission and describe how access will be maintained.

From a methodological standpoint, projects are expected to follow rigorous design and reporting standards that support reproducibility and translation, including principles such as randomization, blinding when appropriate, sound sample-size estimation, and clear data handling practices. The announcement also clarifies the difference between a clinical trial and other clinical research: a clinical trial involves prospectively assigning human subjects to interventions to evaluate effects on biomedical or behavioral outcomes, and for the clinical trial option, applicants should be prepared to launch within the first year and address regulatory steps such as FDA IND or IDE planning soon after award.

On the funding and logistics side, awards are issued as grants under 31 USC 6304. Eligible applicants are listed as unrestricted. The anticipated direct costs for the entire period of performance are capped at $2.0 million per award. The DoD expects to commit about $9.6 million total to make roughly three awards under this mechanism, contingent on federal funding availability and the outcome of peer and programmatic review. The opportunity is administered by the Department of the Army, U.S. Army Medical Research Acquisition Activity (USAMRAA), under funding opportunity number HT942524PCRPISA (CFDA 12.420). The original closing date is August 30, 2024, and awards supported with FY24 funds are expected to be made no later than September 30, 2025, with FY24 funds expiring for use on September 30, 2030.

Finally, the announcement points applicants toward practical resources for partnerships, populations, and disparity-focused work, including CDMRP databases, the North Carolina-Louisiana Prostate Cancer Project biorepository, NCI and NIH disparity and community-based participatory research networks, and additional federal and nonprofit organizations that can support meaningful community engagement. These resources are included to help teams build credible implementation settings, recruit appropriately, and ensure the work is grounded in the needs and realities of the communities the project is meant to serve.

• The Dept. of the Army -- USAMRAA in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "DoD Prostate Cancer, Implementation Science Award" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 12.420.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2024-05-07.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2024-08-30. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 3 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Unrestricted.

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