Early Phase Clinical Trials

Neurodegenerative diseases of aging are among the least understood and most undertreated diseases today. If ignored, the social and economic costs of managing these diseases will continue to rise. Meeting these challenges requires pioneering approaches to accelerating treatments.

The Early Phase Clinical Trials: Canada program was created to provide funding support for clinical trials and clinical trial sub-studies that have excellent preliminary data.

Program Overview

Please refer to the Program Details and Request for Applications (RFA) document for more information.

Goal: To provide funding to support clinical trials and/or clinical trial sub-studies that could accelerate the development of therapeutics for neurodegenerative disease aging.

Applicant Eligibility:

Eligible Principal Applicants must be at or above the level of Assistant Professor or equivalent, and be affiliated with a Canada Revenue Agency-qualified donee institution located in Canada. Co-applicants and Collaborators must be at the post-doctoral level or above, and can be working outside Canada.

Applicants may appear in any role on any number of projects.

Project Eligibility:

Projects must meet these conditions to be eligible:

• Be a clinical trial(s) and/or a clinical trial sub-study(s) that accelerates the development of therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases of aging.
  • Projects that require only up to $200,000 over up to 18 months may also be submitted to the Rapid Response program.
  • Translational research other than clinical trials and/or clinical trial sub-studies should be submitted to the Transformational Research program or the Rapid Response program.
• Be the development of a therapeutic and/or tool.

Please refer to the What We Fund page for Institute definitions of neurodegenerative diseases of aging, translational research, therapeutic, tool, and clinical trials.

The Institute encourages applicants to contact us (neuro@weston.ca or +1 416-935-4056) with any questions regarding this program, including whether a potential idea is in scope.

Application Process

There are two stages to the application process:

1. Letters of Intent (LOI)
2. Proposal

An application requires the submission of a Letter of Intent which will be reviewed by our scientific review committee. Applicants with high potential projects will then be invited to submit a Proposal. Instructions for submitting the Proposal will be forwarded to those invited.

Applicants can expect to receive the outcome of their LOI application within ~2 months of submission.