GOSH Charity National Research Project Grants

As part of our transition to a new Grant Management System, the outline application questions for the upcoming National Research Project Grants round have been published below:

Applicants may now begin preparing their applications using the published outline application questions. These have been provided to support early preparation only and do not constitute a formal application.

Our new Grant Management System will go live in mid-June 2026. From this point, applicants must enter and submit their responses through the system, including transferring any answers prepared in advance.
Please note that all applications must be submitted through the Charity’s Grant Management System. Applications submitted by any other method will not be accepted. The deadline for submission on our Grant Management System is 3pm, Thursday 16 July 2026. Please sign up if you'd like to be notified when the Grant Management System becomes available.

If you would like to submit an application, we recommend the following steps:

1. Sign up for the guidance webinar
2. Sign-up to hear when our new Grants Management System is live
3. Download the outline application questions for the 26/27 National Research Project Grants
4. Begin preparing your application offline
5. Check back in mid-June for notification that the system is live, and transfer your application answers into the Grant Management System
6. Submit your application Before 3pm on Thursday 16th July.

A guidance webinar for applicants will be held on Friday 15 May 2026 to give candidates further information on the call. Please sign up to the webinar. The webinar will be recorded and can be made available to any applicants unable to attend.

GOSH Charity is inviting project grant applications for paediatric health research studies focusing on complex or rare diseases. The call will support research across the spectrum of medical conditions affecting the foetus, neonates, and children directly, as well as pregnancy disorders that affect the child.

All projects must aim to improve understanding of the disease or associated conditions or to improve outcomes for the affected child. Proposals will be expected to have the potential to lead to new medical developments or improved healthcare (e.g. diagnostic tools or novel interventions) through laboratory and/or clinically based research. Qualitative and mixed-methods research projects, including healthcare management for specific childhood diseases/conditions or groups of closely related conditions, are also welcomed. Applicants must clearly articulate the route to clinical application and/or potential for patient benefit, regardless of where their proposed studies are positioned along the basic-to-applied research continuum.

This is a national funding call that is open to independent researchers based anywhere in the UK.

Investigators can apply to this call as a lead applicant if they:

• Are an independent researcher who holds a salaried academic research post or a research fellowship.
• Are able to employ a team and, if applying for a lab-based project, able to access dedicated laboratory space to enable delivery of the project.
• Have authority to financially manage their own grants (in collaboration with the finance teams at the organisation).

The lead applicant's salary must be covered through to the end of the grant period, or a supporting letter must be provided by your organisation guaranteeing your continued employment throughout the duration of the grant. Exemptions apply for applicants that hold early career fellowships; please see our scheme guidance document for more information.

As a way of increasing and maintaining capacity in this critical research area, we are particularly interested in supporting projects from promising applicants at an early career stage. To this end, whilst we are committed to supporting high-quality research regardless of career stage, if a funding decision is required between applications of equivalent quality that are deemed equally competitive, those from early career researchers (ECRs) will be prioritised.

For the purpose of this call, we would consider an ECR as someone:

• Who holds a PhD (or equivalent)
• Who has attracted less than £350,000 total grant income as PI (excluding income for their own salary such as fellowships).
• Who does not hold a tenured academic position.

GOSH Charity has made £2.5 million available for this funding call.

Total costs between £50,000 and £350,000 per application will be considered, for a maximum project duration of three years. These grants will cover direct research costs associated with the project, please see our scheme guidance document for details.

Applications will be received and managed by GOSH Charity and considered by its Research Assessment Panel. A lay Research Patient Insight Panel will also assess the lay summary and PPIE sections, and their feedback will be fed into the scientific assessment.

Final funding decisions are expected to be announced in late March 2027.

Please note that all applications to this call will be uniformly assessed according to the same criteria for remit, quality, impact, and value for money, irrespective of their potential for co-funding by one of the research partners, or the career stage of the main applicant. Any further prioritisation of applications will only be considered where proposals are deemed equally competitive.

We are delighted to extend the reach of this call by offering, in association with our research partners, the possibility of joint funding for projects focusing on their respective areas of interest. This year we are proud to partner with a number of rare disease charities:

• Action for A-T – Ataxia telangiectasia.
• Myotubular Trust – Myotubular and centronuclear myopathy.
• The Norrie Disease Foundation – Norrie Disease.
• Debra UK - Epidermolysis Bullosa

As funders, we have signed a cross-funder statement coordinated by the Academy of Medical Sciences, on the COVID-19 institutional memory: how we as funders will look to fairly remember and recognise the impacts of COVID-19 on grant applicants' work in the future.

As part of this statement, we would like to reassure our research community that we are aware of the immediate and long-term impacts of COVID-19 on research activities. Any disruptions to research activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic will be taken into consideration by our panels and committees when assessing an individual applicant’s record of outputs, research achievements, and career progression in future grant rounds. Read the Covid-19 Statement.

If you would like to know more about the funding call, our research partners, or have any questions not covered in the FAQs, please do not hesitate to email the GOSH Charity Grants team.

View previously funded National Call projects.