# Two-year translational fellowships that pay scientists to develop their own discovery

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-translational-fellowships/  
OnCo record `idea-fund-translational-fellowships` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Postdocs who make a translatable discovery usually leave it behind when their contract ends. A two-year fellowship with salary, a project budget of $250,000 to $500,000 and mentors from drug development, regulation and the clinic would pay them to turn it into a candidate drug, diagnostic or device, with the option to license it or found a company.

## Summary

Fellowships with salary, a project budget of $250,000 to $500,000 and structured mentoring from drug developers, regulatory experts and clinicians, awarded to postdoctoral scientists or clinical fellows to translate a specific finding: target validation, lead optimisation, assay development, prototype device. Fellows are hosted in translational institutes or academic drug discovery units and have the option to found a company or license the asset. Precedents include the Wellcome and MRC translational fellowships, Blavatnik Fellowships and the EMBL-EBI industry programme; oncology lacks a dedicated scheme at scale.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: Translational fellows advance their assets to a defined milestone (validated target, lead series, IND-enabling start, prototype in patients) in at least half of cases, and a third of assets attract follow-on funding or licensing within two years of the fellowship, versus a small minority of comparable unfunded discoveries.
- Rationale: Discoveries are stranded because the people who understand them are on short contracts with incentives to publish and move; paying the discoverer to translate is cheaper than paying a company to rediscover. Existing translational fellowship schemes report high rates of spin-out and licensing.
- Proposed test: Run fifty fellowships over three years and pre-register the milestone and follow-on metrics against a matched cohort of discoveries from the same institutions without fellowship support.
- Maturity: speculative
- Actor: research

## Sources

- Bottleneck evidence (The valley of death between lab and product): Butler, Translational research: crossing the valley of death (Nature 2008): https://doi.org/10.1038/453840a

## Connected records

- ideas: [Funded research pathways for surgeon-scientists and radiation oncologist-scientists](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-surgeon-scientist-pathway/), [Hospital-funded protected time for clinician-scientists, repaid by trial revenue](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-protected-time-physician-scientists/), [Regional translational institutes with academic GMP suites and IND teams](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-translational-institutes-gmp/)
- bottlenecks: [Not enough oncologists, nurses, pathologists, physicists](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-workforce/), [The valley of death between lab and product](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-translational-valley/)
- key papers: [Translational research: crossing the valley of death](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-butler-nature/)

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