Application Handling Procedure

How Your Application will be Handled

1. The processing of grant applications to AICR will take approximately 1 year from submission to the commencement of funding for successful applications. Applications which are successful having been submitted to the April round will be awarded funding from 1 April of the following year, and for the October round, from 1 October of the following year.
2. All applications received in the relevant submission period will be subject to an initial review which may reject applications for reasons such as being incorrectly completed, ignoring our application guidelines, being outside the areas of research that we support, failing to comply with our policies on animal research or tobacco-industry funding, requesting unrealistic levels of funding, etc.
3. There will then be an initial triage by the AICR Scientific Advisory Committee assessing all of the applications and removing those which they consider do not merit further assessment or peer review.   Applicants are notified as soon as possible if their application has been rejected at this stage.  There will be no feedback for applications rejected at this stage, nor will we enter into any discussion or debate.
4. The remaining applications will then be sent out to external peer reviewers. We endeavour to get 2 external reviews for each application.
5. At the grants allocation meeting each application will be assessed by the committee considering the external reviews and their own assessment of the quality of the science. There will be a further triage to remove applications judged to have no prospect of being funded.
6. The remaining applications will be discussed and graded. Applications will be awarded funding on the basis of this graded list until the allocated funds are expended. Inevitably some high quality projects with good external reviews will not be funded simply because we never have enough money to fund all the worthwhile projects which score highly.
7. The successful applicants will be notified with an offer of award letter and supporting paperwork (agreements, IPR letter etc.). Unsuccessful applications will also be notified by email and we will enclose any available comments from the external reviewers. You should note that our review form is in 2 parts; the first part is for the exclusive use of AICR and will not be disclosed to the applicants under any circumstances. We ask reviewers to complete a second page to pass on comments, suggestions, criticisms etc. to the applicant but we cannot make this compulsory.
8. Finally, your signature on the application is taken as your agreement to all of our terms and conditions including the procedures for processing and assessing your application. If you are unsuccessful we will provide feedback where possible but will not enter into any discussion or debate on views expressed therein or the decision of our Scientific Advisory Committee, which is final.