New FY21 Policy on the Inclusion of Women and Minorities in Clinical Research

December 22, 2020

The research community of the recently implemented Fiscal Year 2021 (FY21) Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP) Policy on the Inclusion of Women and Minorities in Clinical Research and associated changes to application requirements. In 2019, the DoD was directed by the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense to develop a plan to ensure the appropriate representation of women and minorities in its extramural research.

It is now the policy of CDMRP that women and individuals from minority groups be included in all CDMRP-funded clinical research studies, unless there is a clear, justifiable rationale that it is inappropriate with respect to the health of the subjects or the purpose of the research. As specified in the policy, applicants will be required to include a strategy for the inclusion of women and minorities in all clinical research (e.g., studies involving human subjects or identifiable human biospecimens or datasets) and submit an anticipated enrollment table(s) with the proposed enrollment distributed on the basis of sex/gender, race, and ethnicity at the time of proposal submission. Additional post-award reporting requirements will be specified in the terms and conditions of applicable awards.

The complete policy, Frequently Asked Questions document, and Suggested Inclusion Enrollment Report format are available under the “Resources and Reference Material” section on the electronic Biomedical Research Application Portal (eBRAP) (https://eBRAP.org).  Please refer to the detailed descriptions of funding opportunities, evaluation criteria, and submission requirements which can be found in each Program Announcement.

 All CDMRP funding opportunities, both recently and previously released, are available on the CDMRP website (https://cdmrp.army.mil).

 For more information on types of funding opportunities offered and application strategies review the CDMRP Webinar Series: https://cdmrp.army.mil/pubs/Webinars/webinar_series.

Last Updated on December 22, 2020