NCI Bioengineering Research Grants (BRG)

NCI Bioengineering Research Grants (BRG)

Supports bioengineering teams tackling cancer by connecting life and physical science groups.

The NCI Bioengineering Research Grants (BRG) program funds multidisciplinary collaborations between life sciences and physical, computational, or engineering sciences applied directly to cancer problems. The current vehicle is PAR-27-072, posted May 4, 2026, with a closing date of July 5, 2029 and an archive date of September 5, 2029 — making it a multi-year standing Program Announcement with Special Receipt. NCI issues the PAR with NICHD and NEI as participating Institutes. Contact for applicants is bioengineeringresearchgrants@mail.nih.gov.

Awards use the R01 mechanism with a maximum of $500,000 in direct costs per year; no cost-sharing is required. The program supports design-directed, developmental, discovery-driven, and hypothesis-driven research. Funded projects must either apply a multidisciplinary bioengineering approach to a specific biomedical problem, or integrate, optimize, validate, translate, or accelerate adoption of promising tools, methods, and techniques for basic, translational, or clinical cancer research. The program also supports clinical trials that test the functionality or validate the performance of a bioengineering approach, but conventional Phase III trials and commercial production studies are excluded.

Foreign organizations may apply as lead applicants — an explicit eligibility that is unusual within NCI's portfolio. Domestic for-profit small businesses, nonprofits, universities, and research organizations are all eligible. Foreign components within a US-led grant, however, are not allowed. Receipt dates follow the standard NIH R01 schedule published at grants.nih.gov. Teams should note that PAR-27-072 replaced prior BRG vehicles for FY27 and that the companion NICHD and NEI participating interests extend the program's relevance to developmental biology, vision research, and related bioengineering areas.