The National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine (NLM), is accepting applications under PAR-25-131, Computational Approaches to Curation at Scale for Biomedical Research Assets (R01 Clinical Trial Not Allowed).
The program supports novel computational methods that increase the speed and scope of biomedical curation, improve findability, accessibility, interoperability and reuse of research assets, and produce openly accessible datasets and/or tools. Responsive work may address automated metadata generation, harmonization, annotation, quality control, multi-modal biomedical data curation, community-driven curation, and related scalable methods.
Deadlines: The current new-application deadline is September 15, 2026 at 5:00 PM local time of the applicant organization. Renewal, resubmission, and revision applications are due October 15, 2026. The next new-application cycle is January 15, 2027, followed by a February 17, 2027 renewal/resubmission/revision deadline. The NOFO expires April 16, 2027.
Funding: Application budgets are limited to $250,000 in direct costs per year, excluding consortium F&A, and must reflect the actual needs of the proposed project. The maximum project period is four years. NIH does not require cost sharing under this NOFO. The number of awards depends on appropriations and the availability of meritorious applications.
Eligibility: Eligible domestic applicants include public and private institutions of higher education, qualifying nonprofits, small businesses and other for-profit organizations, state and local governments, Tribal governments and organizations, eligible federal agencies, U.S. territories or possessions, independent school districts, housing authorities, faith-based and community-based organizations, and regional organizations. Foreign organizations and non-U.S. components of U.S. organizations are not eligible to apply. Applicant organizations must maintain the required SAM/UEI, Grants.gov, and eRA Commons registrations, and PDs/PIs must have eRA Commons accounts.
Nonresponsive projects: NLM will not review projects that rely on manual curation without computational at-scale methods, focus on non-biomedical assets, involve an NIH-defined clinical trial, duplicate NLM products or databases, fail to produce FAIR curated datasets or tools, or fail to provide open-access outputs.
Submission: Applications follow NIH Research (R) instructions and are submitted electronically through ASSIST, Grants.gov Workspace, or an institutional system-to-system solution. Applicants must comply with applicable page limits, resource-sharing requirements, data-management and sharing requirements, and the NOFO-specific Research Strategy instructions. NLM strongly encourages prospective applicants to discuss project suitability with program staff.
Atlas fit: This opportunity is highly relevant to biomedical informatics, healthcare data science, research data infrastructure, AI-assisted curation, academic health systems, research institutions, and qualified technology organizations. For-profit organizations are structurally eligible and no match is required, so a direct Dr. Miltie path is structurally possible. However, structural eligibility alone does not establish submission readiness. A legitimate direct R01 pursuit requires a scientifically responsive biomedical curation research concept, a qualified PI and scientific team, suitable biomedical datasets and computational infrastructure, quantitative validation, open dissemination capability, and active federal and NIH registrations. Preferred posture: Dr. Miltie Direct / Structural Eligibility Only / Needs Marc Review. Route organization-specific applicant evaluation and outreach to applicable state healthcare and academic-research pathways.