Enterprise Innovation brings internal and external collaboration opportunities to our faculty and trainees. These programs provide extra funding and opportunities to work with industry to advance faculty/trainees' translational research projects.
Please contact Dr. James Bellush at james.bellush@cornell.edu if you have any questions or need guidance on your application.
1. BrightFocus Foundation: Innovative Research Grants in Macular Degeneration
- Eligibility: Foundation’s goal is to advance innovative research promoting advances in the etiology, prevention, and treatments of Alzheimer’s disease, macular degeneration, and glaucoma.
- Innovation Grant is intended to provide support for high-risk / high-reward projects in AMD space. Proposals should not be derivative and must instead focus on outside of the box ideas.
- Submission Details: Eligibility and proposal guidelines can be found at the BrightFocus RFP website.
- Award Details: Budgets up to $200,000 per year ($600,000 for three-years)
Submission Deadline: July 17, 2025 by 5pm
2. Burroughs Wellcome Fund: Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease
- Eligibility: Program focused on supporting assistant professors with multidisciplinary approaches to studying human infectious diseases. Funding will support high-risk research projects that seek to understand the fundamental biology of colonization, infection, commensalism, and molecular – to – systemic interactions of pathogens and humans.
- Submission Details: Access information on submitting LOI here.
- Award Details: $505,000 in total funding over 5 years.
- Submission Deadline: LOI due July 17, 2025
3. Wellcome Trust: Mental Health Award
- Eligibility: Award is designed to fund projects that draw on the potential of longitudinal data to drive innovation in early identification of anxiety, depression, and/or psychosis
- Successful teams will integrate advanced analytics or longitudinal data with research to enable more precise and effective early interventions
- Applications from diverse and interdisciplinary teams are encouraged
- Submission Details: Eligibility and proposal guidelines can be found at the BrightFocus RFP website.
- Award Details: Between $1 million and $5 million for 3-5 years
Submission Deadline: July 22, 2025
4. Pfizer: Real-World Data Generation with Elranatamab in Relapsed/Refractory Multiple Myeloma
- Eligibility: PhD or MD investigators seeking support for research studies that focus on generating evidence on the use of elranatamab in multiple myeloma in the real world setting.
Project Focus Areas:
- Safety and efficacy of elranatamab in RW use
- Outpatient administration of elranatamab and alternative CRS/ICANS mitigation strategies
- Impact of prior treatments (BsAb, CAR-T, ADC) on elranatamab outcomes
- Infection patterns, timing, types and management strategies
- Clinical and biological features of refractoriness, early, or late response, or relapse and establishment of response biomarkers
- Submission Details: Proposal login through CyberGrants > Select Competitive Grant > Oncology – Hematologic RES > 2025 ONC Global RWE Elra RES
- Award Details: Total available budget is $200 - $500k
Submission Deadline: July 24, 2025
5. National MS Society: Barancik Prize for Innovation in MS Research
- Eligibility: Nominees may be early–mid career MS researchers who are working on exceptional, innovative projects with the potential to lead to pathways for treatment and cure of MS.
- Nomination letters must be submitted on behalf of an individual, highlighting impact of nominee’s research including maximum of 2 journal citations.
- No specific residency or citizenship requirements.
- Submission Details: Nominations are open and will be accepted through August 11, 2025. Letters should be emailed to barancik.prize@nmss.org.
- Award Details: $125,000
Submission Deadline: Nominations due by August 11, 2025
- Eligibility: Full-time independent investigators (Asst. Prof or higher) with committed cognitive aging research programs. Start-up support will be provided for 3 years to help investigators focusing on clinical–translational or basic mechanistic research underlying cognitive aging and age-related memory loss.
- Studies should yield transformative discoveries and be high-risk in nature
- Examples include: pilot clinical trials, POC interventions for age-associated cognitive impairment, preclinical data on interventional approaches, and mechanistic / target based studies of age-associative cognitive impairment in experimental models
- Submission Details: Information on LOI application materials can be found here.
- Award Details: $750,000 over 3 years
- Submission Deadline: August 12, 2025