DOD Chronic Pain Management, Pain Management Collaborative Clinical Research Award | HT9425 23 CPMRP PMCCRA

Opportunity Information: Apply for HT9425 23 CPMRP PMCCRA

The DOD Chronic Pain Management, Pain Management Collaborative Clinical Research Award (FY23 CPMRP PMCCRA) is a Department of Defense funding opportunity focused on improving how chronic pain is managed in real-world care settings, especially those serving Service Members, Veterans, and their families. The program is built around supporting large-scale, pragmatic clinical trials that compare existing, evidence-based pain management options and study how best to implement them in routine practice. The overall goal is to speed up acceptance and consistent use of proven chronic pain management approaches across the Military Health System (MHS), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and other health care organizations that treat these populations.

A key expectation is that proposed projects are not just testing whether an approach works, but also generating practical evidence that can shape clinical standards of care. Applications are expected to clearly explain how the results will inform the development, refinement, or revision of existing recommendations, guidelines, or models of care for chronic pain. Because the intent is to influence practice at scale, the emphasis is on comparative effectiveness research (how well different established options perform in real-world conditions) and implementation science (how to integrate and sustain those options in health systems). Strong collaboration with VA and/or MHS providers is described as essential, since partnering with these delivery systems is central to producing results that are meaningful and actionable in the environments where military and Veteran patients actually receive care.

The award is specifically tied to congressional appropriations for chronic pain research, so every application must have chronic pain as the primary focus, either on its own or alongside common comorbidities. Projects that mainly center on other conditions such as traumatic brain injury, depression, or PTSD (even when pain is present) are considered out of scope for this mechanism. Likewise, the program is not intended to support development of new opioid-based therapies, and applications proposing novel opioid interventions will not be selected. That said, studies that aim to understand, optimize, or reduce opioid use within current prescribing practices, as part of chronic pain management, are allowed as long as the core focus remains chronic pain care and outcomes.

Funding under this mechanism must support a clinical trial. In practical terms, the program is requiring prospective assignment of human participants to one or more interventions (which can include a control or placebo when appropriate) in order to evaluate biomedical or behavioral health-related outcomes, including outcomes related to safety, effectiveness, and/or efficacy. Projects that do not measure an intervention outcome of that kind would not meet the definition of a clinical trial for this announcement. Importantly, the interventions studied are expected to be approaches that have already shown efficacy in some settings; the PMCCRA is not the right fit for first-in-kind, experimental, or untested pharmacologic or non-pharmacologic therapies. Applicants wanting to test novel treatments are directed instead toward the FY23 Clinical Exploration Award.

Structurally, the PMCCRA is designed as a phased program. It begins with a 15-month planning phase meant to complete the concrete steps needed to launch a complex, multi-site pragmatic trial. Examples include securing regulatory approvals, finalizing data collection tools and common data elements, and onboarding and activating study sites. After that planning period, a second phase to execute the full-scale clinical trial is described as optional and would be considered as a separate next step rather than guaranteed upfront. The mechanism is offered by the Department of Defense (Department of the Army, USAMRAA) under Funding Opportunity Number HT9425 23 CPMRP PMCCRA (CFDA 12.420), uses grant and/or cooperative agreement instruments, is open to a broad range of applicant organizations (with any limits only as clarified in the full announcement), and was anticipated to make a very limited number of awards (listed as 1 for this cycle).

• The Department of Defense, Dept. of the Army -- USAMRAA in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "DOD Chronic Pain Management, Pain Management Collaborative Clinical Research Award" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 12.420.
• This funding opportunity was created on Jul 03, 2023.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Nov 09, 2023. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 1 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Unrestricted (i.e., open to any type of entity above), subject to any clarification in text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility.

Apply for HT9425 23 CPMRP PMCCRA

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