Grant Program
Grants Awarded by Year

2010	2009	2008
2007	2006	2005

FARA supports research through funding competitive grants, promoting collaboration between scientists, advocating for public-private partnerships that support drug development and clinical research and hosting open forums for leading scientists to share their insights, ideas and challenges to advancing treatments for FA.

All FARA grants undergo a competitive external/peer review and internal review, which guides our funding decisions.

The documents above provide a listing of grants funded by year.

In 2010, FARA received more proposals than ever before and funded over $2.7 million in grant funding to more than 30 research projects as well as the Collaborative Clinical Research Network in Friedreich’s Ataxia.

FARA’s Grant Awards are working to advance research in the following ways:

• Discovering novel therapeutic targets (drugs) that improve mitochondrial function, increase frataxin protein levels, or increase expression of the FA gene
• Facilitating the drug development process and translational research so that the most promising discoveries are rapidly brought to treatment trials
• Improving and expanding the cellular models which researchers use for evaluating new therapeutic targets; specifically, utilizing advances in stem cell technologies to create neuron and cardiac cell models directly from FA patient skin cells
• Optimizing and fully characterizing the Friedreich’s ataxia mouse models as well as facilitating access to models through The Jackson Laboratories
• Supporting the clinical research, infrastructure and biomarker discovery required to ensure effective and efficient clinical trials in a rare disease
• Supporting the International Collaborative Clinical Research Network in FA which focuses on: developing and validating clinical outcome measures and biomarkers, capturing the natural history of FA, building a DNA bank for genetic modifier studies, and facilitating the implementation and delivery of clinical trials
• Exploring and testing new hypotheses that further inform and expand our understanding of FA at the genetic, protein and cellular levels
• Supporting young/new researchers with innovative ideas and a commitment to FA research
• Reducing the morbidity and mortality caused by cardiac disease in FA

With such a great need for research funding and resources, FARA would like to recognize and thank our many funding and advocacy partners, including the Muscular Dystrophy Association, FARA Australasia, the National Ataxia Foundation, the American Heart Association, Go-FAR, Ataxia UK, FEDAES and FA-Babel Family, as well as government agencies such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

FARA realized from the beginning that treating and curing FA was far too great a challenge for any one organization and that all such partners would need to put their shoulders to the same wheel in active collaboration. This collaborative approach has worked extremely well, ensuring that our efforts are complementary and additive, not duplicative, getting us all to treatments more quickly together than alone.