Deadline: 15-Apr-25
The PhRMA Foundation Faculty Starter Grant in Translational Medicine offers financial support to individuals beginning independent research careers at the faculty level at an accredited U.S. university.
Translational medicine is a scientific discipline focused on turning observations in the laboratory, clinic, and community into medicines, diagnostics, or other interventions that improve human health. 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 hypothesis-driven 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.
Goals
- Applicants are encouraged to 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 and Epigenetics (Molecular, Pharmaco-, Population, Medical)
- Omics (Functional, Structural, Toxico-, Pharmaco-, Comparative)
- Systems (Biology and Pharmacology)
- Pathways and Networks
- Integrative Biology
- Modeling and Simulation
- Target Identification and Validation
- Biomarker Identification and Validation
- Molecular Epidemiology
- Imaging
- Disease Modeling
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computational Approaches
Funding Information
- The PhRMA Foundation Faculty Starter Grant in Translational Medicine provides funding of $100,000 for one year.
- Funding is conditional upon the awardee’s continued employment with the university, which will be assessed on a quarterly basis prior to payment. Awardees are required to notify the PhRMA Foundation if they leave the university. Payments will be made directly to the university on behalf of the awardee, with the understanding the university will administer the funds.
- Funds must be used to conduct the proposed research. Funds may not be used for salary support of the awardee, fringe benefits, or indirect costs.
- Funds may be budgeted to include the support of a technician, graduate student, or postdoctoral fellow at an hourly rate. The funds may not be used to provide tuition, fringe benefits, or indirect costs for said personnel. Said personnel may not be an active award recipient of the PhRMA Foundation.
- Up to $1,500 may be used for travel to professional meetings by the awardee.
- Funds may be used to purchase equipment and/or data to support the research efforts.
- Funding may begin as early as January 1, 2026, or on the first day of any month thereafter, up to and including August 1, 2026.
- If you are offered a PhRMA Foundation award, the Foundation will reconfirm your external grant support. Should you receive additional funding in excess of $150,000 in annual direct costs, the PhRMA Foundation award will be withdrawn.
- A final progress report and financial report will be required within 60 days of the grant’s conclusion.
- Unspent funds are to be returned to the PhRMA Foundation upon the grant’s conclusion.
- Any changes to the proposed project must be approved by the PhRMA Foundation.
- Funds are non-transferable.
Eligibility Criteria
- Applicants (U.S. and non-U.S. citizens) must be full-time, promotion-eligible, research-intensive faculty at a PhD and/or MS degree-granting accredited U.S. university by the time of award activation. (Awards may be activated between January 1, 2026, and August 1, 2026.)
- You are not eligible if your faculty status began before January 1, 2023.
- Applicants who have taken leave from their career (e.g., parenting of a child, childbirth, long-term care of a parent/spouse/child/dependent, personal health issues) that puts them outside of the eligibility time frame can reach out to PhRMA Foundation staff ahead of their LOI submission to determine their eligibility. The Foundation aims to be flexible and adjust these time frames if necessary and appropriate.
- Applicants must be eligible to apply for independent external research funding by their university.
- Applicants should not have other substantial sources of research funding, excluding intramural funding or start-up funding from their university. Applicants are ineligible if they are the principal investigator (PI) of an R or K series award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, or other significant financial award from any grant-making institution. Generally, funding over $150,000 a year is considered substantial, unless you are the PI of a grant where funds go to training others. If this is the case, explain in your extended letter.
- The Foundation will not consider multiple applications for 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.
For more information, visit PhRMA Foundation.