Newsletter | January 2026

In 2025, the PhRMA Foundation celebrated its 60th anniversary. Since our founding, we have awarded more than $100 million in grants and fellowships to over 2,700 researchers at hundreds of U.S. universities and institutions.

• Read: 60th Anniversary Report
• Watch: Awardee Survey Highlights

The PhRMA Foundation and the Journal of Managed Care & Specialty Pharmacy (JMCP) are partnering on a Challenge Award competition that will award trainees for outstanding manuscripts addressing artificial intelligence (AI) in managed care pharmacy.

The Foundation will provide a Challenge Award — a prize of $5,000 — to the first author of up to five winning papers, and JMCP will publish all accepted manuscripts.

Deadline: March 2, 2026

2026 Awardees in Drug Discovery, Delivery
and Translational Medicine

The PhRMA Foundation awarded 50 early-career researchers more than $3.7 million in 2026 fellowships and grants focused on drug discovery, drug delivery, and translational medicine research.

Listen to our 2025 awardees discuss their research and career paths on our YouTube.

Alan Wong: Reducing Copper Intake from Foods as a Treatment Strategy for Pediatric Leukemia

Dr. Maja Kuharic: How Feeling Like a Burden Affects Patients’ Health Care Decisions

Madison Seefeld: Improving Vaccines by Hitchhiking Across the Nose’s Mucosal Lining

Dr. Brittany Hartwell: Activating Frontline Immune Defenses in the Nose with Hitchhiking Vaccines

Claire Fleming: Targeting an Immune Signal That Drives Severe Disease in COVID-19

Miao Cao: Boosting the Efficacy of CAR T Cell Therapy for Colorectal Cancer

The Foundation and the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) awarded four papers with $5,000 Trainee Challenge Awards as part of a Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics special call on the pharmacology of next generation therapeutics.

Read the winning papers in the December 2025 issue.

The Foundation and the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics (ASCPT) awarded six papers with $5,000 Trainee Challenge Awards as part of a Clinical and Translational Science special call on AI and machine learning.

Read the winning papers in the October 2025 issue.

The Foundation and ISPOR—The Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research awarded four papers with $5,000 Trainee Challenge Awards for their Value in Health papers addressing the integration and impact of AI in health economics and outcomes research.

Read the winning papers in the November 2025 issue.

Congrats to these Foundation-funded researchers on their recent work.

**Indicates research directly supported by a PhRMA Foundation award.

Interpretable machine learning model for predicting recurrence in patients with diabetic foot ulcers, BMJ Open Diabetes Research & Care

David G. Armstrong, DPM, MD, PhD (PhF24), University of Southern California

**Targeting Mycolic Acid Biosynthesis with Cyclic Sulfamates: A New Strategy against Mycobacterium tuberculosis, ACS Infectious Diseases

Priscila Cristina Bartolomeu Halicki, PhD (PhF23), University of Central Florida

**AI-Driven Variant Annotation for Precision Oncology in Breast Cancer, Clinical and Translational Science

Elizabeth Brunk, PhD (PhF25), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

**Aging alters genomic instability at endogenous mutation hotspots in mice, Scientific Reports

Alexandra M. D’Amico, PhD (PhF22), The University of Texas at Austin

**Roles of AI-based synthetic data in health economics and outcomes research, Value Health

Tim Lai (PhF25) and Surachat Ngorsuraches, PhD (PhF23), Auburn University

**Radionuclide-Dependent Stimulation of Antitumor Immunity in GD2-Targeted Radiopharmaceutical Therapy Combined with Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors, Radiation

Cynthia (Choi) Lilieholm, PhD (PhF23), University of Wisconsin-Madison

**Biomimetic liposomes in drug delivery: from design mechanisms to applications, Chemical Society Reviews

Jianqin Lu, BPharm, PhD (PhF22), University of Arizona

**Priority for Self or Others? Incorporating Equity Considerations in a Preference-Based Health Value Assessment, Value in Health

Surachat Ngorsuraches, PhD (PhF23), Auburn University

**Extracellular vesicle–mediated gene editing for the treatment of nonsyndromic progressive hearing loss in adult mice, Science Translational Medicine

Xiaoshu Pan, PhD (PhF24), University of Florida

**Inactivation of cellular retinol-binding protein 1 protects against bis-retinoid accumulation and light-induced retinal degeneration in mice, Journal of Biological Chemistry

Jacqueline Plau, PhD (PhF23), Case Western Reserve University

Epigenetic Regulation of Chromosomal Instability by EZH2 Methyltransferase, Cancer Discovery

Aakanksha Rajiv Kapoor (PhF23) and Albert S. Agustinus (PhF21), Weill Cornell Medicine

Physicochemical Characterization of Choline Amino Acid Ionic Liquid Solvated Linear–Dendritic Block Copolymers, ACS Omega

Eden E. L. Tanner, DPhil (PhF22), University of Mississippi

Comprehensive Evaluation of Human and Murine Protein Coronae Formed on Choline Carboxylic Acid Ionic Liquid-Modified PLGA Nanoparticles, Bioconjugate Chemistry

Eden E. L. Tanner, DPhil (PhF22), University of Mississippi

LDL-binding IL-10 reduces vascular inflammation in atherosclerotic mice, Nature Biomedical Engineering

Lisa Volpatti, MS, MPhil, PhD (PhF25), Northwestern University

**Engineering T3 and T7 host range to target protein receptors and guide bacterial evolution, iScience

Kevin Yehl, PhD (PhF23), Miami University

STEAM: Spatial Transcriptomics Evaluation Algorithm and Metric for clustering performance, Briefings in Bioinformatics

Fan Zhang, PhD (PhF22), University of Colorado School of Medicine

David G. Armstrong, DPM, MD, PhD (PhF24) of the University of Southern California delivered keynotes at the 19th National & 7th International Wound Congress in Turkey and the 2nd Congress on Research and Innovation in Noncommunicable Diseases in Peru, highlighting the intersection of innovation, technology, and interdisciplinary collaboration in diabetic foot care.

Elizabeth Brunk, PhD (PhF25) of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was awarded the 2025 LCRF | Boehringer Ingelheim Early Investigator Award on Innovative Approaches Toward the Treatment of HER2-Driven Lung Cancer.

Anh T.Q. Cong (PhF25) of Mayo Clinic won best poster awards for her PhF-funded research at two conferences: EMBO Workshop on DNA Topology and Topoisomerase in Genome Dynamics in Poland and the 19th Conference of the Asian Crystallographic Association in Taiwan.

Ariel Leyte-Vidal (PhF25) of the University of Miami presented a poster on her PhF-funded research at the American Society of Hematology (ASH) annual conference in Orlando and earned the ASH Abstract Achievement Award.

Xiaoshu Pan, PhD (PhF24) of the University of Florida gave an oral presentation about her PhF-funded research at Pacifichem 2025.

Srividya Swaminathan, PhD (PhF21) of the Beckman Research Institute continues the research initiated through her PhF award, with one of her students winning the prestigious California Institute of Regenerative Medicine Training Grant for the work and another lab member presenting the research at the American Society of Hematology meeting.

Eden E. L. Tanner, DPhil (PhF22) of University of Mississippi recently had her breast cancer research featured on the local news.

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