Translational Medicine Predoctoral Fellowship Grant

Funder: Pharmaceutical Research And Manufacturers Of America Fnd Inc (PhRMA)

The PhRMA Foundation's Translational Medicine Predoctoral Fellowship supports promising students engaged in advanced stages of thesis research in translational medicine. The program focuses on innovative research that translates laboratory discoveries into practical applications that enhance patient care. It provides $30,000 in stipend support per year, conditional upon the awardee's ongoing university enrollment. This fellowship seeks to foster a new generation of researchers dedicated to improving health outcomes through rigorous scientific inquiry.

The Foundation catalyzes the careers of promising researchers through competitive, peer-reviewed grants and fellowships in the fields of drug delivery, drug discovery, translational medicine, and value assessment and health outcomes research.
The PhRMA Foundation’s Predoctoral Fellowship in Translational Medicine supports promising students (U.S. and non-U.S. citizens) in advanced stages of training and thesis research in translational medicine.
Program Goals
Translational medicine fosters a patient-focused research cycle that stretches from the lab bench to the patient bedside and back to the lab again. This includes adapting basic research discoveries in cells, tissues, and animals for application in humans and then taking the knowledge of what did and didn’t work in the clinic back to the bench.
Given the breadth of the discipline, the PhRMA Foundation’s Translational Medicine Program focuses specifically on novel research that uses the “bedside to bench” approach to address unmet needs in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease. The Foundation seeks research proposals that focus on identifying unmet clinical needs and developing new diagnostic, experimental, and computational approaches and technologies to improve patient care and management.
Applicants should work with clinical collaborators to identify unmet clinical needs.Plans to corroborate results from model systems need to include methods to validate findings in human samples, subjects, or patients and be documented in the proposal.
Proposals should integrate innovative technologies, with advanced biological, chemical, diagnostic, and pharmacological sciences and engineering methodologies in areas that include but not are limited to:
Genetics (Molecular, Pharmaco-, Population, Medical)Genomics (Functional, Structural, Toxico-, Pharmaco-, Comparative)Systems (Biology and Pharmacology)Pathways and NetworksIntegrative BiologyModeling and SimulationTarget Identification and ValidationBiomarker Identification and ValidationMolecular EpidemiologyImagingDisease Modeling
Funding
The PhRMA Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in Translational Medicine provides $30,000 in stipend support per year for 12, 18, or 24 months. Funding is conditional upon the awardee’s continued enrollment with the university, which will be assessed on a quarterly basis prior to payment. Payments will be made directly to the university on behalf of the awardee, with the understanding the university will administer the funds. This award is intended solely as a stipend and may not be used otherwise.

Eligibility

Applicants (U.S. and non-U.S. citizens) must attend an accredited U.S. university as full time, in-residence students.Applicants must have completed most of their pre-thesis requirements (at least two years of coursework) and be engaged in thesis research as PhD candidates by the time the award is activated. Applicants should expect to complete their PhD requirements in two years or less from the time funding begins. The thesis advisor’s letter of support must verify the applicant’s doctoral candidacy.Applicants enrolled in MD/PhD programs should not be engaged in required clinical coursework or clerkships while the fellowship is active. Fellows are expected to devote full time (including summers) to their research.Only one predoctoral applicant per lab may apply for this award.

Ineligibility

Individuals just beginning graduate school should not apply.The Foundation will not consider multiple applications for the same or similar efforts on the same project. For instance, if a predoc, postdoc, and faculty member from the same lab are all submitting applications for proposed efforts on the same project, the efforts must be separate activities and not duplicative.PhRMA Foundation funds may not be used for tuition, fringe benefits, or indirect costs to the university.An individual may not simultaneously hold another funding mechanism providing stipend support while the PhRMA Foundation predoctoral fellowship is active, unless it helps to supplement the award to a level that is consistent with other predoctoral fellowships the university offers. Studies where the only human data is from a pre-existing biobank are non-responsive. Predoctoral fellowships should not be seen as a way to fund the principal investigator’s currently funded research project