The National Cancer Institute is accepting applications for RFA-CA-27-002, Advanced Development and Validation of Emerging Technologies for Basic and Clinical Cancer Research (R33 Clinical Trial Not Allowed), under the Innovative Molecular Analysis Technologies program. The opportunity supports advanced development and rigorous technical validation of emerging technologies for molecular or cellular characterization of cancer and for cancer-relevant biospecimen handling, preparation, and quality control.
Deadline: November 10, 2026 at 5:00 PM local time of the applicant organization. Late applications are not accepted under this NOFO.
Funding: NCI intends to commit approximately $5.9 million in FY2027 to fund about 13 awards. Application budgets are limited to $300,000 per year in direct costs, and the maximum project period is three years.
Scope and readiness: Projects must be beyond initial proof of concept. Applicants are expected to provide supportive preliminary data showing that major feasibility gaps have been overcome and to conduct rigorous validation of the proposed technology. The Research Strategy must include a dedicated quantitative Performance Measures subsection with numeric target values and defined assessment methods. Applications lacking numeric performance measures will not be reviewed.
Responsive technology areas: The NOFO may support novel platforms, assays, instrumentation, devices, and associated methods that materially advance cancer research. Non-responsive areas include whole-body or in vivo imaging instrumentation, clinical trials or toxicology beyond technology demonstration, biomarker discovery or validation, drug or therapy development, and projects primarily centered on software, informatics, databases, data mining, statistical methods, computational methods, or machine-learning models.
Eligibility: Eligible applicants include public and private institutions of higher education, qualifying nonprofit organizations, small businesses and other for-profit organizations, state and local governments, school districts, Tribal governments and organizations, public housing authorities, eligible federal agencies, and other applicant classes specified in the NOFO.
Cost sharing: No cost sharing or matching is required.
Submission and registrations: Applicants must maintain required SAM.gov/UEI, eRA Commons, and Grants.gov registrations. The PD/PI must have an eRA Commons account and ORCID identifier. Applications may be submitted through ASSIST, an institutional system-to-system solution to Grants.gov, or Grants.gov Workspace and must follow the NIH Research (R) Application Guide and this NOFO’s specific instructions. A Data Management and Sharing Plan is required when scientific data will be generated.
Direct Dr. Miltie review: For-profit organizations are an eligible applicant class, so a direct Dr. Miltie pathway is structurally possible and is not blocked by a mandatory match. It is not submission-ready without verified evidence of a responsive advanced-stage cancer-research technology, supportive preliminary data, quantitative performance targets, a qualified research team and PI, complete NIH registrations, and any applicable human-subjects or other research-compliance requirements. Institutional applicant opportunities should be evaluated through the applicable state healthcare pathways.