The National Cancer Institute (NCI) will allow some early career researchers to extend their first major grants through a reimagined MERIT Award mechanism. Top-scoring proposals among the FY18 cohort will be given the opportunity to convert their funded grant to a MERIT Award, which will allow five-year grants to be extended an additional two years.
The changes were announced in a February post to the NCI blog Cancer Currents by Norman (Ned) Sharpless, who began as NCI Director in October 2017.
L. Michelle Bennett, director of the Center for Research Strategy at NCI, told BioCentury that the decision to reboot the Method to Extend Research in Time (MERIT) Award arose from an effort begun by NCI last summer to...