Finding Potential Sponsors and Studies
Funding Opportunities for Grants
The Office of Research has a robust website to help researchers identify funding needs, search for funding opportunities and create alerts to provide information about new funding opportunities. The website has information about databases for private foundations and federal funding, State of Ohio Funding, internal funding and crowdfunding.
Funding Opportunities for Contracts
Research teams interested in contract opportunities with pharmaceutical or device companies should contact study sponsors to discuss study availability and the feasibility of being selected as a study site. A pharmaceutical or device company is typically called the industry sponsor when they are the source of funding for the study. There are a lot of pharmaceutical, device, biotech and contract research organizations (CROs) that conduct research studies. Often networking with peers who are already established with conducting industry research studies may be helpful in identifying a sponsor with a clinical trial of interest.
A new site may wish to sign up for a clinical trial listing service, such as Centerwatch. Centerwatch provides services to help sponsors, CROs and service providers identify clinical trial sites. The site can list their information, for a fee.
There can be steep competition for good studies. The key to finding sponsors and good studies is to get on the sponsors “Preferred” list. Preferred sites are those that perform well by being able to start up quickly, enroll the required number of participants and provide quality data. Sponsors often ask a “Preferred” site if they are interested in new studies before identifying other study sites.
ClinicalTrials.gov is an option to look up who else might be doing research in your area and who funded their projects. You can collaborate with another institution/investigator or pursue their supporters for your work.