Yuzhong Liu, an assistant professor at Scripps Research, has been awarded the 2026 PhRMA Foundation Faculty Starter Grant in Drug Discovery to support her work in synthetic chemistry and synthetic biology.

The PhRMA Foundation is a nonprofit organization that has supported early-career scientists in biopharmaceutical innovation for more than 60 years. This award provides $100,000 over one year to help researchers launch independent programs in drug discovery, drug delivery and translational medicine. Liu was one of 50 early-career scientists to receive awards from the foundation this year, and the only recipient of the Faculty Starter Grant in Drug Discovery.

“The PhRMA Foundation invests in future leaders with bold ideas, and each of our 2026 awardees has the potential to shape the next generation of therapies that will improve patients’ lives,” says Amy Miller, president of the foundation. “We’re proud to support these young investigators with the creativity and determination to make an impact in their fields.”

With this support, Liu will advance her lab’s efforts to explore glycosides—sugar-decorated molecules that play critical roles in determining how drug molecules behave, where they travel in the body and how strongly they activate the immune system. Despite their broad therapeutic potential, glycosides remain underexplored in medicinal chemistry because they’re difficult to isolate from nature and even more difficult to systematically modify.

To overcome this challenge, Liu’s lab integrates synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, and synthetic and analytical chemistry to develop glycoside-based molecules that are more accessible and experimentally tractable. Her lab aims to leverage the potential of glycosides to enable more effective vaccines.

“The ability to systematically modify the sugar sequences of these molecules opens up exciting possibilities for drug discovery,” says Liu. “With this award, we can explore how subtle changes to glycoside structures affect their biological activity, helping us bioengineer more effective therapeutics.”

Liu has won numerous honors for her research, including a 2024 Michelson Prize from the Human Immunome Project, which provided a $150,00 grant to support her work on developing more effective cancer vaccines.