Cutting-Edge Basic Research Awards (CEBRA) (R21 Clinical Trial Optional)
The CEBRA grant funds innovative research to advance understanding and treatment of substance use disorders by supporting high-risk, high-impact projects.
Funder: National Institutes of Health
Due Dates: August 12, 2025 | March 10, 2026 | August 5, 2026 | March 10, 2027 | August 11, 2027
Funding Amounts: Up to $150,000 direct costs per year, max $275,000 over 2 years (R21 mechanism)
Summary: Supports high-risk, high-impact, and innovative basic research to advance understanding, prevention, or treatment of substance use disorders (SUDs).
Key Information: Updated March 31, 2025: Carefully review the full announcement for recent changes and requirements.
Description
The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Cutting-Edge Basic Research Award (CEBRA) is designed to foster highly innovative or conceptually creative research related to the etiology, pathophysiology, prevention, or treatment of substance use disorders (SUDs). This program supports high-risk, potentially transformative research that is underrepresented or not currently included in NIDA’s portfolio, with the goal of accelerating advances in addiction science.
Projects should either:
- Develop and/or adapt revolutionary techniques or methods for addiction research (or those with promising future applicability to SUD research), and/or
- Test an innovative and significant hypothesis for which there is little precedent or preliminary data, and which, if confirmed, would transform current thinking in the field.
The CEBRA program is not intended for incremental research or extensions of ongoing projects. It encourages both established SUD researchers and investigators from other fields to propose novel approaches, tools, or conceptual frameworks relevant to SUDs.
