Advancing promising technologies and therapies towards clinical application is a complex undertaking. Academic research often lacks easy access to regulatory, therapy development expertise, manufacturing, and healthcare practice, leading to high failure rates. For this reason, the European Joint Programme on Rare Diseases (EJP RD) has initiated a mentoring programme for rare disease researchers. The aim of the mentoring is to increase the impact and patient benefit of the excellent science funded in EJP RD. With this mentoring support, applicants will receive project-specific feedback from a panel of drug development, biomarker validation, methodological and regulatory experts tasked with optimizing the translational feasibility of the study.