Congratulations to all our recent awardees in the November 2011 microgrant competition! Click here to see summaries of the funded projects. Our next competition will be held in April 2012. 

The microgrant program is offered by the Rare Disease Foundation, the BC Children's Hospital Foundation and our generous donors and supporters. Currently, microgrants are only available to those who are, or have a collaborator, affiliated with a Canadian institution. For questions about the microgrant program, please contact our Program Coordinator, Dr. Marion Thomas at: mthomas at cw.bc.ca.

The successful model of microfinance was applied to the problem of: How do we improve a situation where there are 7000 known rare diseases and many more undescribed diseases? The Rare Disease Foundation microgrant program is designed to be a small amount of funding ($3500) that must accomplish a specific research goal and directly improve patient care.

Our applicants, who are usually on the front lines of rare disease care, choose problems that reflect their patient's priorities. They also choose research problems that are solvable for today's patients or address problems that are common to a number of different diseases. The small amount given necessitates collaboration which leverages our funding and our low red tape approach enables productive collaborations to be formed with the best researchers anywhere in the world.

One of major problems we see with disease research today is the silotization of research activity. Each group of scientists have a very deep understanding of their area but surprisingly there is no easy way to move a project from one silo of expertise to another. A few disease specific organizations now take on the role of research champion, moving an investigation from one expert to the next in rapid fashion, but the bulk of rare diseases lack their champion. Rare Disease Foundation research programs are designed to find and fund those champions.

Translational Care

Providing therapy for a disease requires a set of activities that start with the patient (define the disease, its subtypes, its complications, the way it evolves), goes through a group of laboratory studies (find the cause, understand it, model it), then into drug development and ends up back at the patient with a trial of therapy. Since no therapy is ever perfect, this is a circle that repeats to promote optimization over time. We call this cycle "Translational Care". The cycle involves translating clinical findings to the laboratory and vice versa and the objective is better care. We believe this is the most efficient model for developing therapies for rare diseases and more rapidly improving rare disease care.