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Target Grants: Request for Proposals

Target Grants: Request for Proposals

Award Amount and Performance Period

  • Award amount: Up to $480,000 total costs, including up to 20% indirect costs
  • Performance period: Up to two years duration starting October 1, 2025.

Background and Purpose

amfAR’s research initiatives are aimed at finding a cure for HIV that will be useful to the 40M people living with HIV (PLWH). The urgency of our goal demands that we direct our funding to studies that uncover vital knowledge directly applicable to clinical or pre-clinical cure efforts.

Persistent reservoirs of virus not cleared by antiretroviral therapy represent the main barrier to a cure. amfAR’s Target Grants should focus on pushing the boundaries of biomedical research to achieve sustained HIV remission or complete viral eradication. Priority will be given to clinical or pre-clinical applications studying pragmatic and scalable interventions that can be implemented globally, including in the communities most affected by the epidemic.

The proposed research must be conducted and validated either in vivo (in PLWH, non-human primates, or humanized mice), or ex vivo (in cells isolated from PLWH or infected animals). Interventions tested exclusively in cell lines or in primary cells from HIV-negative individuals will not be considered responsive to this RFP. Submissions that propose only describing the reservoir (i.e., without pre-clinical or clinical interventions) will not be forwarded for review, unless they provide new and critical insights that will meaningfully accelerate HIV cure strategies.

Applicants should be able to:

  1. Describe the clinical or pre-clinical intervention they are working towards.
  2. Articulate the current stage of development of the proposed approach.
  3. In pre-clinical settings, describe the steps needed to progress to clinical testing.

Application Process and Deadlines

  1. Applicants complete a project Synopsis, using a template that can be downloaded through the form below, and send it to grants@amfar.org with the subject line, Principal Investigator’s “LAST NAME, FIRST NAME – TARGET GRANT.”
  2. amfAR Research Department verifies applicants’ eligibility and reviews Synopses based on relevance, potential impact and alignment with amfAR’s mission.
  3. A selected number of applicants will be invited to submit a full application. We regret we are unable to discuss every submission with applicants.
  4. All invited applications are evaluated and scored through external peer-review process.

amfAR will be hosting an informational webinar on Tuesday, May 20, at 12:00 p.m. EDT. Sign up here to attend.

  • Synopsis submission deadline: June 18, 2025
  • Invitation to submit full grant application: June 24, 2025
  • Deadline to submit full application: August 7, 2025

For more information regarding Target Grants, please refer to our Frequently Asked Questions.

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