BMFTR funds "Interdisciplin­ary Consortia for Research into the Pathomechanisms of Post-Infectious Diseases"

As part of the National Decade Against Post-Infectious Diseases, the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) provides funding to interdisciplinary consortia conducting research into the pathomechanisms of post-infectious diseases.

Funding is provided for interdisciplinary collaborative projects aimed at further elucidating, validating, and functionally characterizing the pathomechanisms of post-infectious diseases (PAIS) that are already generally understood, as well as investigating their therapeutic modifiability. The focus is on Long/Post-COVID Syndrome and post-infectious ME/CFS. However, comparative studies of these conditions with PAIS caused by other pathogens are also possible.

Funding is available for all stages of preclinical and clinical research necessary to further elucidate the fundamentally understood pathomechanisms of PAIS and to generate strategies for their application in prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. These include, among others:

• Basic mechanistic research;
• Identification of new predictive, diagnostic, or prognostic biomarkers relevant for the stratification of patient groups;
• Preclinical research aimed at developing new therapeutic approaches;
• Studies using relevant preclinical disease models, provided they are relevant to the pathomechanistic questions under investigation;
• Systems biology and data-driven approaches.

The following will not be funded:

• purely exploratory collaborative projects without a clearly defined pathomechanistic hypothesis;
• Research focused exclusively on the modeling of complex data, including omics data;
• interventional clinical trials.

The call for proposals can be found on the BMFTR website .

The process consists of two stages; the deadline for submitting the research proposal is January 27, 2027.