Pilot and Feasibility Program

PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT (PILOT AND FEASIBILITY PROGRAM) The Pilot and Feasibility (P&F) Program is a critical and integral component of the Pennington/Louisiana NORC. The purpose is to stimulate outstanding research in nutrition and obesity which is aligned with our NORC programmatic theme “Nutrition, Obesity and Metabolic Health through the Lifespan.” The NORC gives highest priority to translational research related to NORC theme(s). Awards are primarily to young promising investigators to help establish their research careers. The selected research proposals receive funds to support costs of the project plus use of the NORC Scientific Cores. Although the level of support from this program for each individual project is relatively modest, this type of start-up funding is frequently the most difficult to identify in the research setting. Institutional commitment of funds to the NORC P&F Program has been strong and consistent with Pennington Biomedical contributing approximately 50% of the total money put into the NORC P&F program. We expect to at least keep the current level of institutional support and even aim to increase it in the next funding cycle (from sister Louisiana academic institutions and philanthropy). With these institutional funds, the P&F Program has been innovative and supported new initiatives such as multi- disciplinary and multi-institutional proposal solicitations to stimulate collaboration and has worked collaboratively with other centers to leverage resources. The P&F Program has operated efficiently and has yielded outstanding productivity. Overall, from 2004 to November 2020, 58% of all P&F award recipients have received additional investigator-initiated funding. The P&F grant program is a vibrant part of the NORC, enabling exciting new lines of research that have resulted in successful new K and R proposals and awards. According to members’ feedback, the P&F Program is running smoothly and achieving its purpose of stimulating research. Based on the existing infrastructure, we will now expand the Program to increase the integration of Louisiana NORC institutions, using committed institutional funds and potentially more philanthropic funding from our Pennington Biomedical Research Foundation.