2026 - 2029 Grants - Healthy Community Priority

PAR-26-040 is the National Library of Medicine's standing R01 vehicle for bioinformatics, translational bioinformatics and computational biology, and it is one of the more accessible NIH entry points for AI and machine learning work on biomedical data. The NOFO explicitly names artificial intelligence, machine learning and large-scale computational platforms among the transformative technologies it seeks to leverage for extracting actionable knowledge from vast, diverse and complex biological datasets, and it calls out studies that use AI and ML applications for predictive and analytical bioinformatics research as being in scope. That explicit language is worth noting, because AI-heavy proposals submitted to general biomedical NOFOs frequently draw reviewer objections that the methods work is not the point of the call; here it is. Three structural features make this an unusually practical target. First, it is a parent-style PAR with multiple rolling due dates running from 5 June 2026 through 5 February 2029 and an expiration of 6 March 2029, so there is no single make-or-break deadline and a resubmission has somewhere to go. Second, eligibility is broad - higher education institutions, nonprofits, for-profits including small businesses, state, local, federal and tribal governments, and foreign entities are all eligible, and cost sharing is not required. Foreign institution eligibility in particular is not universal across NIH NOFOs and is a genuine differentiator. Third, clinical trials are optional and human subjects involvement is optional, so purely computational projects are fully within scope rather than being penalised for lacking a clinical arm. The trade-off is budget scale: 250,000 dollars per year in direct costs over at most 4 years is modest for an R01 and rules out large data-generation components. This is a fit for method development, tool building and secondary analysis, not for assembling new cohorts.

PAR-26-040 is the National Library of Medicine's standing R01 program for bioinformatics, translational bioinformatics and computational biology, and it is written explicitly around leveraging transformative technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and large-scale computational platforms to extract actionable knowledge from vast, diverse and complex biological datasets. Posted 11 February 2026, applications opened 6 April 2026 with a first due date of 5 June 2026, and the program runs through multiple standard submission cycles until it expires 6 March 2029 - which makes it one of the more useful AI-in-health opportunities to know about, because unlike a one-shot RFA it gives applicants several shots across three years. Supported areas include omics research spanning genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and epigenomics, machine learning applications for predictive and analytical bioinformatics, systems biology and computational modelling, biomarker discovery and drug target analysis, and development of FAIR findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable tools. NLM makes a pointed distinction that reviewers apply: it wants methods that yield functional insights explaining biological phenomena, not purely predictive models that report an accuracy number without mechanistic interpretation. Budgets are capped at USD 250,000 per year in direct costs over up to 4 years.