Want to support us? Tell the NIH to (at least) reinstate ESI status to new PIs whose grants were withdrawn. Let your representative know that meritious research that would move us forward is being defunded. Tell your peers about this! Raise awareness. Please help us! 12/12.

This means I will have to compete with established labs without years of grant support to establish my lab track record. This would make getting my research program off the ground even more difficult. We did all the right things and are now being punished for it. 11/12.

Being a new investigator comes with the perk of higher pay lines and other pots of money you can apply to. Because of the withdrawal of the award, I am no longer considered a new investigator, and NIH will not reinstate that category for any other new PIs affected by this. 10/12.

Now that the award is gone, PIs funded through this mechanism are in an awkward position. Most grants are in their first or second year, meaning not enough time has passed to have enough data for a fully fleshed-out new R01 submission. In my case, the award is > 1 year 9/12.

After discussion and all the panel scores, the grant gets an impact score and percentile. For R01, NIAID makes the decision based on percentile. To be funded, you needed to meet the target payline. PAR-22-241 paylines are the same as any other R01. so merits are the same. 8/12.

For all intents and purposes, PAR-22-241 R01s are evaluated as standard R01. The grant went to the same study session as other R01s and got scored with the standard R01. To be discussed, it needed to be ranting on the top 50% of the R01 proposal regardless of mechanism. 7/12.

About the mechanism that funded our research. The parent mechanism was designed for New and At-risk investigators. This was a program designed for faculty to get their first proposal and attend a workshop to learn how to continue funding their research. Sounds great right? 6/12.

Sadly, losing this funding will slow us down on making findings that can critically impact how we manage invasive aspergillosis and fungal pathogens in general. This was also a critical period for our young research program and our ability to contribute to human knowledge 5/12.

We were excited about all the neat science this proposal would allow us to do! It would have allowed us to expand our knowledge on how to fight invasive aspergillosis–a deadly disease with limited drug treatment and increased drug resistance! 4/12.

The R01 general goal was to see if targeting septins could make antifungals more effective. We found that it does! Instead of stopping the growth now the drug kills the fungus! Deleting septin + treatment increased survival to over 70% compared to WT infection of 30%. 3/n

This means that not even a year into this proposal, we will lose funds for Y2-Y5 that supported my grad student, a postdoc we were recruiting, and our lab specialist. We are working for internal funds for my students & specialists. The postdoc search had to be canceled 2/12.

Recently, we found out that our R01 funded through PAR-22-241 was withdrawn by @NIAIDNews as @NIH no longer prioritizes research programs related to DEI. This has been devastating news for our young research group, and we are now trying to scram together for a path forward 🧵1/12.

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