What does ICAL mean in INTERNATIONAL

The International Consortium on Acute Leukemia (ICAL) is an organization dedicated to advancing research on acute leukemias. ICAL works with individual clinical and laboratory investigators throughout the world, as well as with patient foundations and advocacy groups, to build collaborations that result in progress in diagnosis and treatment of acute leukemias.

ICAL facilitates and enhances the ability of researchers to collaborate on projects focused around finding new treatments for acute leukemias. This includes connecting people with complementary interests and expertise to pursue collaborative projects, facilitating sharing of data and resources among researchers, providing access to training opportunities for laboratory staff, organizing educational seminars and workshops, supporting conference attendance, and helping investigators develop successful grant applications.

ICAL provides several types of grant support for research related to acute leukemias. These include Investigator Awards for exploring innovative ideas for research projects; Travel Grants to encourage collaboration between researchers from different regions; Postdoctoral Fellowships for developing young investigators; Clinical Trials Network Grants intended to facilitate multidisciplinary collaborative clinical trials; and Small Grants designed to support smaller studies by experienced laboratories or new investigators.

Any researcher working in the field of acute leukemias is eligible to apply for a grant from ICAL. This includes faculty members at universities or other academic institutions, clinical investigators at hospitals or other health care facilities, basic scientists working at contract research organizations or other industry laboratories, post-doctoral fellows with now principal investigator sponsor, students pursuing doctoral degrees in related fields, etc.

Yes. In order to be eligible for any type of grant funding through ICAL applicants must be working in a particular country or region that has been designated by ICAL as “affiliated” with the consortium (see list here). Additionally, applicants should have appropriate credentials in their field (e.g., MD/PhD/MBBS/faculty appointments) as well as demonstrable experience conducting or leading relevant research initiatives such as clinical trials.

Applications are evaluated according to scientific merit – meaning that priority will be given to those applications which have sound scientific principles underlying them – along with relevance of their proposed project within the scope of curing or advancing understanding about acute leukemia diseases. Additionally they look consider feasibility including whether sufficient resources exists both inside and outside an applicant’s lab environment and whether sufficient personnel exists inside an applicant’s team who can work closely with each other throughout the proposed project timeline