Funder: PhRMA Foundation
Due Dates: October 30, 2026, noon ET (LOI) | February 2027 (Invitations) | March 2027 (Full application) | July 2027 (Award notification)
Funding Amounts: $60,000 annually in stipend support for 12, 18, or 24 months
Summary: Supports postdoctoral training and novel, early-stage drug discovery research with clear potential for human translation.
Key Information: Doctorates must have been conferred on or after January 1, 2024; applicants need two first-author publications.
Description
The PhRMA Foundation’s Drug Discovery Postdoctoral Fellowship supports multidisciplinary, collaborative research training at accredited U.S. universities. It funds novel, early-stage research that integrates scientific disciplines to develop effective, safe, and differentiated treatments while extending researchers’ drug discovery credentials. Every proposal must state a therapeutically relevant hypothesis and demonstrate clear potential for translation to humans.
Supported work includes target identification and validation, disease-mechanism mapping through single-cell and spatial multi-omics, hit and lead identification, molecular modeling, protein biochemistry, and structural biology. Other areas include therapeutic pathways, cell-based and animal studies of drug candidates’ pharmacological profiles, advanced biomedical imaging, and AI or computational approaches that directly advance a therapeutic hypothesis.
