Postdoctoral Fellowship in Translational Medicine

Program Description

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 basic research discoveries in cells, tissues, and animals for application in the 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. 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 Networks  
• Integrative Biology  
• Modeling and Simulation  
• Target Identification and Validation  
• Biomarker Identification and Validation  
• Molecular Epidemiology  
• Imaging  
• Disease Modeling  

Note: Studies that do not involve of human specimens, human data, or patients will not be considered. The results of any model system study are required to involve clinical testing in humans in support of the model and be documented in the proposal. For basic research projects, please apply to our Drug Discovery program. For research on health outcomes and health technology assessment, please apply to our Value Assessment and Health Outcomes Research program.