A Nice Mechanism for Preliminary Work Posted on December 3, 2007 Ihsan M. Salloum (bio) describes small grants that allow for research that can lead to larger mechanisms.

The R21 and there are similar mechanisms, there are small grants that allow people to develop an idea, and in this special case, we are trying to develop a treatment, individual psychotherapy treatment, for people who have bipolar and addictive disorder. And it is a grant that is supporting that particular study for up to three years.

And I think it really provides a nice mechanism to do at least the preliminary work. For example, with this therapy, what we have been able to do, we have done the manual therapy and then we have developed the therapy so that we have trained therapists, and also we have done a pilot study. I don’t think you could do more than a reasonable pilot, but at least the pilot was to compare two therapies, the one that we developed with the other therapies.

So what we are hoping, we haven’t analyzed the data yet, but I think this will allow us, one, to develop the treatment and test it in a preliminary way, and if the preliminary testing is promising, then maybe we could test it further. There are other grants, a small grant like R03 or a similar mechanism. I think that they give a reasonable amount of support to really develop an idea.

This will provide the groundwork for an R01. Today, to be able to get an R01, you need to have some good preliminary work, and this grant or other grants like it, they provide that.

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