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Researcher Stories

Get to know the PhRMA Foundation’s award recipients.

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Treating Infectious Disease and Undernutrition in Young Children

PhF awardee Audrey Brown, PhD, of the University of Virginia, is researching the link between nutrition and infectious diseases in children.

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Leveraging the Therapeutic Potential of the Gut Microbiome

PhF awardee Dr. Shijie Cao aims to take advantage of the connection between our gut microbiome and immune responses to develop new treatments.

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A Targeted Approach for Treating a Rare Autoimmune Disease

Dr. Ali Nili has helped treat many patients with pemphigus vulgaris, which causes painful blisters on the skin and inside the mouth, and he now hopes to develop a novel targeted treatment for the autoimmune disease at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

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Deciphering a Bacteria’s Drug Resistance to Develop Better Treatments

Dr. Ashlan J. Kunz Coyne of the University of Kentucky is studying how a bacteria called Stenotrophomonas maltophilia reacts to various antibiotic regimens.

Awardee Spotlight

Ziyang Zhang, PhD

  • University of California, Berkeley

“The support from the PhRMA Foundation allows us to test a new hypothesis in the infancy of my independent lab. The project will help us develop chemical tools to probe immune signaling, which could unlock new therapeutic mechanisms for autoimmune diseases.”

Developing a Noninvasive Blood Test to Detect Brain Cancer

PhRMA Foundation awardee Dr. Dimitrios Mathios of the Washington University in St. Louis aims to use advanced DNA sequencing techniques and artificial intelligence to identify patterns of molecular changes in the blood of brain cancer patients.