 So, the next item on the agenda is a concept clearance for the novel nucleic acid sequencing technology program. As many of you know, this has been a program that's been going on for about 15 years. It was started by Jeff Slosh, and it's been very, very successful. So, Mike is going to present to you today a request to renew this program at the same level that it's been for a couple of times around. That's $2 million. So, Mike? So this is a concept clearance for novel nucleic acid sequencing technology development. This program has been going on. You could argue that sequencing technology development has really been at the heart of the institute for as long as Eric talked about earlier today. Just the kinds of sequencing technology development has changed over the years. So we're still very interested in investing in this area. And today you're going to hear about what are now expired RFAs from concept clearance of three years ago, and the awards that we've made, some examples of the kinds of research that came in under those RFAs, talk to you about a grantee meeting that we hold to help this community work together well, and then we'll get to the objectives of the concept, some potential research topics, mechanisms and funding that we're planning on using, and the timeline with which this will take place. So, somewhat intentionally used the word expired because the RFA, NIH RFAs have a life, they're allowed to be three years long. That's how long the last set was. The numbers are indicated here. So they're RFA, HT, 15, 031, 32, 33, and then 39, and you can look them up online if you'd like to read them. I just drew, pulled a few words out of them, and I'm not going to read them to you fully, certainly. You can read the slides faster than I will read them to you. But certainly a goal to improve quality and efficiency of DNA sequencing, enable direct RNA sequencing, longer read the links, faster turnaround times, et cetera, and novel chemistries, new physical approaches, instrumentation, and also again, direct RNA sequencing. And really with the idea that we want to push the field forward with an investment in sequencing, nucleic acid sequencing technology development. That's what we were asking for then, and this is a renewal. So we're largely planning to do more of the same because I think it's been rather successful. It also dovetails in well with the strategic planning that you heard about earlier today from Eric. So these are the RO1s and R21s that were funded in the first two years of the RFA. And so you'll see some protein nanopore work from Goodluck and also Winston Temp doing some modified Cs. There are some solid state nanopores, Stuart, Shepard. Juanunu is using zero-mode waveguides to look at pica-gram amounts of material, which is start thinking about one cell's worth of DNA in a sense. Phil Collins has a very interesting method for seeing a polymerase polymerize. It's different than the way PacBio is doing it. And Tim Bester is also on modified cytosines. And then the last one is using liquid chromatography and mass spectroscopy to go at RNA sequencing, a very different approach, but reviewed well and we are hopeful. So these are the kinds of things that are coming in. And one of the messages is we've got some nice breadth. We're investing in places we have invested before. And we're also invested in places that are possible to work in today. So this group does get together. Jeff, we're on a technology development meeting for many years. I inherited that as he retired. And we ran one last May at Northeastern University. It was hosted by one of our grantees, many Juanunu. There were 24 grants represented there, which was 100 grantee participants. And we had the subsequent public meeting, which picked up about another 30 individuals. What we saw, what we heard was that it was certainly informative and interactive. It was a good collaboration for catalysts. People got to know each other that hadn't necessarily met each other before. We got good positive feedback. And you bet we took some lessons learned that we're going to apply to the next meeting. So that's one of the ways we're trying to take. You know, one of the things about this sequencing technology development RFA is we're really just asking people to come in with their best ideas. And then we're trying to give them some help to do good science, but not direct the science that they're doing. So some of the concept objectives are developing new DNA sequencing technologies, direct RNA sequencing technologies, and then substantial advances to existing sequencing technology. And again, encourage investigators, this is on the concept side, covered by your three pager, encourage investigators to pursue their best ideas and make an accompanying investment in foundational sequencing technology development. And it's just worth pointing out as we talk at times about solicited and unsolicited, this actually falls into the solicited category. It's an RFA, and yet there's a lot of freedom for investigators to come in with what they think is a great idea. And just some examples of the potential research topics. These are very similar to what was in the last RFA's that I referenced, novel chemistries, exhaustively sequencing every RNA or DNA molecule in the sample. Very long reads of 150KB are not sounding so long anymore, but still there's a definite need for long reads. And DeNovo assembly, especially perhaps DeNovo phased assembly. Modified bases, direct RNA sequencing without CDNA, and then again orders of magnitude improvement to existing technologies, which sound a little familiar to what the last RFA said. So, what we've put in the concept clearance is for R01s and R21s, total of $2 million per year for three years, FY19, 20, and 21. And similar amounts for R43s and R44s, which are small business grants. Also the same fiscal years. So this is the timeline. We're currently early in 2018, and we would expect to accept applications later in 2018, then again in 2019 and 2020. And certainly that places us very well for hopefully another concept clearance to, so we can accept applications in 2021 as the planning process includes a publication. So this concept is investigator focused. It's foundational for sequencing technology. It's a continued investment by the Institute in nucleic acid sequencing technology development. And I'd just like to thank a few people. Melpy, Kasapi really helped make these slides smooth and did so many other things and many of these slides are pulled from some other presentations we've used internally. Chris Wellington, likewise, Carlin Hutter, helped with some good comments. And then I certainly want to point out Ken Nakamura, who's done all the reviews for these applications. And Dan and Gilcrest and Mike Payzen really stepped up and helped me during the fall, but sometimes needed some additional help managing this program. So happy to take questions or comments. OK, go ahead. So it's a $4 million a year project. Two for the. So it's $2 million in one fiscal year, and then that follows out over a number of years, and then $2 million. Let me go back a little bit. So in FY 18, we will be making FY 19. So in FY 1920 and 21, we'll invest $2 million in new money in each of those years. So and then that has out your commitment. But you set an equivalent amount for the business awards. Well, for the SBIRs, yes, that's correct. One thing to keep in mind with the SBIRs is they tend to not be quite as competitive. And so we're going to take what we find there, which in based on what we've seen so far, we didn't really get as much as $2 million worth of activity. And that's driven by a number of factors, like our once a year deadline doesn't meet businesses go, go, go very well. Sorry. One back. Yeah, right there. Similar amounts. So it's a $2 to $4 million a year project. Yeah, it's going to be closer to $4 in terms of what the investment is. But I think this group is largely focused on the academic side. So that's why the presentation is largely on the academic side. Steve, I just want to voice my support for this program. I think it's incredibly valuable. And in fact, I would say essential. And I'd just like to point out that virtually all the sequencing technologies that are on the market today are disseminated of their roots in some sort of grant funding, where people actually have to take risks in order to actually try to make something work. And this is an area that companies are not very good at, at taking risks. Getting these grants, I think, not only gives some credibility to the approach that an investigator wants to take, but also involves them in a community that gives them support to advance the technologies. And it also gives them validation. As these technologies require a tremendous amount of money to actually get to the marketplace, there needs to be some peer-reviewed process where people that invest money in these things can see that this has merit and that there's some validation of that. And so for all those reasons, I would just really support this program. And my only question would be whether or not it's enough. Grant, I would just, one small thing, you mentioned it. There's a substantial further investment. I've certainly heard numbers of 30, 40 million dollars that might be coming in after. And that's a small, it's just to get it started. Yeah. Yeah, so I'd just like to echo my support for this program. I think it's great. These are the kinds of things that have the potential to transform the field and year's downfield that we have no idea and can't really anticipate. And again, I think, like last two council members commented, is this really enough? Are you getting more applications in that you could fund deeper, given more resources? So far, it's been reasonably well-matched. Of course, would you have an amount of $2 million? The interest tends to reflect that. There's a number of applications you get. Our internal stream processes, I think, leave some room if we got another really good one to go ahead and fund it. But there's obviously an internal discussion that squeeze other science. Yes, Carol? Do you have a sense of how many of the people that attend the group meetings, the grantee meetings that aren't currently funded by this program actually go on to submit a grant or are planning on submitting a grant to this program? Sort of bringing in new blood and increasing the pool from which the grants could be supported? So I think one answer to that is the grantee meetings are heavily attended by not just the grantees themselves, but also by their postdocs and graduate students. It's a, you know, the meeting size is not much smaller or much larger than this room, and so it's very conducive to people actually talking with one another. There certainly are some cases where, what we'll be talking about. So there are some cases where grantees are there, and maybe they're on a no-cost extension, and they will come in for an application later on. So there's a little bit of people who are still in the field, still working on the field, and there's definitely new people coming in. If we went back to, there's an easy way to answer this, but it's been in for a while, Stuart's been in for a while, many's been in, Collins is new, Shepard's been there for a while, Temp is new, I think Bester was there for a while, and Zon is new. So was that about a third? I didn't sit there and count. Well, so when you have your meetings, the people who are currently funded in the program obviously come and bring their postdocs, but the non-grantees, people who aren't involved with any of these groups come, and is it a way to increase the visibility of the program to get additional people submitting grantees? So the way we structure the meeting, we're still moving it around a little bit based on lessons learned, so the way we're going to run it this year is a little different than last year. So this year is going to be two days of grantee meeting followed by one day of an open session meeting. So people who want to come in and be involved in the open session when many of the grantees are still around, so we try to make it worth their while to stay, get that opportunity a little bit more, and then we have some of the grantees present in the open session meeting because it makes sense. This is back to the budget question. So on the slide, it looks like my rough math prevails. It's about, actually, $4 million. It's about $4.5 or $4.4. So this was more than twice the years worth. Oh, I see. So these are two years at a time? Well, we awarded half these in FY 16. Thank you. And the other half in FY 17. And the extra $500,000 or so largely reflects the supplement. So I'll start by echoing my enthusiasm and not a ton to add to the comments that Steve and others made. One thing that I really like about the way that you structured this is really focusing on niches of sequencing, not really niches, but aspects like direct RNA sequencing that haven't really been captured by commercial platforms so far. And just to something that Carol said, I think from back when I was a part of one of these awards, one thing that was really nice about those meetings and the private part of those meetings was that it was a pretty open forum where people could discuss unpublished results. I'm not sure if opening it up completely would change the tenor of that, but it might. But I think that's always a balance with that kind of thing. Any other questions, comments? So I think we will call vote. And what I would like to say before saying that is that I think staff has heard that there is enthusiasm for increasing the amount of this program, but we will vote on the $2 million that's being requested. So could I have a motion and a second? All of those who approve, have sentions? No, and any no votes? So the motion carries. Thank you.