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Portal Grant Program: Calling All PhD Students & Post-Docs

What would you do if you could get anything into any cell? What experiments would you run? What questions would you finally be able to answer? If intracellular delivery is the bottleneck standing between you and a breakthrough, this is your opportunity to remove it. 

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Portal is launching a competitive grant program to fund the most exciting project ideas that could be enabled by easy intracellular delivery. We invite PhD students and post-doctoral researchers to submit a one-page proposal describing the scientific application you would pursue if efficient, scalable intracellular delivery were no longer a constraint, such as:

  • Engineering immune cells for next-generation therapies

  • CRISPR modifications in difficult to work with cell types

  • Building new tools for live-cell assays and imaging

  • Reprogramming stem cells or primary cells for regenerative medicine

  • Any other application where delivery into cells is the limiting factor

 

What Portal Makes Possible:

Portal’s mechanical delivery platform removes many of the barriers that hold back ambitious cell biology research. With Portal, you can:

  • Deliver multiple cargoes simultaneously

  • Achieve high efficiency without viral vectors or harsh chemical reagents

  • Scale experiments reproducibly from bench to high-throughput

  • Work with sensitive primary cells that don’t tolerate conventional methods

  • Deliver virtually any cargo type: RNA, proteins, gene editors, probes, impermeable small molecules or peptides, and more

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We’re looking for bold application ideas - proposals that lead with the science you want to do, not just the delivery method you’d use.

To help spark those ideas, join us for an informational webinar on Thursday, May 14 at 12 PM PT / 3 PM ET to learn more about Portal’s novel capabilities. Sign up here.

Grant Award

Selected applicants will receive:

  • Access to Portal’s instruments and consumables
  • Technical collaboration with Portal scientists

  • Support for presenting research findings at scientific conferences

Proposal Requirements (One Page Maximum)

  • The Big Idea: What scientific question or therapeutic challenge are you trying to solve? What would success look like?
  • Current Barriers: What’s stopping you today? How is intracellular delivery the bottleneck?
  • Proposed Approach How would removing the delivery constraint change your research? What would you do with Portal’s platform
  • Experimental Plan & Readouts
  • Key experiments and metrics for success.

  • Proposed Approach How would removing the delivery constraint change your research? What would you do with Portal’s platform 

Clarity and feasibility matter. Figures are welcome but must fit within one page.

Proposals will be evaluated on:

  • Innovation
  • Feasibility
  • Potential Impact
  • Delivery as a genuine bottleneck (is removing the delivery constraint central to the application?)

Eligibility & Timeline

  • Current PhD students or post-doctoral researchers affiliated with an accredited academic or research institution
  • Submission Deadline: May 31, 2026
  • Award Notification: June 30, 2026
  • Project Start: Rolling, upon agreement 

Next Steps:

  1. Learn more about Portal’s novel capabilities by attending an informational webinar on Thursday, May 14 at 12 PM PT / 3 PM ET
  2. Registration link: https://luma.com/mnox4j5g
  3. Email your one-page PDF proposal to: boost@portal.bio
    Subject line: Portal to New Frontiers Submission – [Your Name]

We’re excited to fund researchers with ambitious ideas for what becomes possible when delivery is no longer the bottleneck. Tell us what you’d do and let us help you make it happen!