Why One of the Largest Health Funders Launched a Spinoff Research Organization to Speed Innovation
/
IMAGE: MKARCO/SHUTTERSTOCK
In philanthropy, as in most other human attempts to solve complex problems through science and research, it’s not just about the money, says Regina Dugan, CEO of Wellcome Leap. It’s also—maybe even mainly—about the system that manages and drives the innovation.
Wellcome Leap, a U.S.-based nonprofit health research accelerator, is both connected to and separate from Wellcome Trust, the global health philanthropy giant. The trust created Wellcome Leap to serve as a sort of innovation skunkworks with a get-it-done-yesterday approach to the development of cures and solutions to global health needs. Back in 2018, Wellcome Trust committed $300 million to get Leap rolling. The other day, the trust added another $335 million, giving Leap more than a half-billion to redirect in funding for global research programs. The organization and its programs, though funded by Wellcome Trust, are its own, separate from the trust.
We wrote about Leap back in 2018, when Wellcome Trust announced the Leap Fund with the goal of creating a new type of organization that would work out beyond the leading edge of innovation—“on bold ideas that would fall outside the remit of conventional life sciences funding.” One of its first goals was to name a CEO to run the new organization, which it did about two years ago, announcing that veteran technology executive and research leader Regina Dugan would head up Leap.
In those two years, Dugan and Leap’s 10 employees have moved fast to architect a global advanced scientific research organization. They’ve started up five research programs, working in areas like the mRNA technology that enabled the speedy development of COVID-19 vaccines, but also psychiatry and depression, and human organ physiology to address kidney and other organ failures. So far, Leap has engaged 70 institutions on six continents in its programs, representing some 650,000 scientists and engineers. Researchers carry out work from the labs where they’re based, which can include universities and research institutions; small, medium and large companies (including venture-backed companies); and government or nonprofit research institutions.
What’s most notable here is not just that Wellcome Trust has committed a great deal of money to advance health research. After all, it’s been doing that for many years, just as many other governments and philanthropies have. What’s notable is the novel nature of the organization that Leap intends to be, and the stated goals of its leadership to solve huge, long-standing problems in human health, faster and more successfully than has been achieved in the past, by challenging some of the conventions and structures of science and health research.
“An organization like Welcome Leap is created to challenge the consensus point of view, and it’s very difficult to do that from inside the organization that holds the consensus point of view,” said Dugan. “This is not unique to philanthropy. It’s not unique to government. It’s also true in companies. We see this over and again, that the organization that is designed to challenge your current perception of how the business will evolve, or how the products will evolve, needs to sit separate from the business units, because it’s very difficult to challenge that from within the business unit.”
If Dugan sounds like she came from the world of advanced government research or Silicon Valley, it’s because she has. She’s a former director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Department of Defense R&D group that, for 60 years, has been key to the development of world-changing military and civilian technologies, such as GPS and the internet. Dugan also led research and development teams at tech giants including Google and Facebook.
Leap says its programs aim to deliver breakthroughs in five to 10 years, what it acknowledges may be “seemingly impossible results on seemingly impossible timelines.” But what Dugan correctly cites as the questions of greatest interest to research funders and leaders, in philanthropy and beyond, is how well Leap will be able to maintain focus and drive in these global research networks. And will it be able to accomplish this more successfully than the rest of the research world?
“You have to set this ambitious goal that is also measurable and testable,” Dugan said. “But then you have to do something more — you have to orient behind it. You move from a siloed type of work to a dynamic network, where the activities are synchronized against all of the performers in the program.” Leap’s program directors will be the ones responsible for that synchronization. Leap will, for example, deal with and simplify issues like contractual and legal obstacles. But most importantly, says Dugan, it will have to create and maintain momentum and interaction across all the disciplines, organizations and countries to get the breakthroughs it seeks.
“The point of founding Leap was the idea that we need to ensure that somewhere in the system, there’s a truly disruptive element that can take the bigger risks and operate globally to find the best talent and ideas to push forward,” said Dugan. She has good reason for optimism. Organizations founded on these rule-breaking ideas—like DARPA—have been world-changers.
“The problems we’re talking about are global in nature, and to my knowledge, no organization has operated across international borders the way Leap must to make these things happen at the global scale,” Dugan said.
It all sounds great, but will Leap be successful in developing game-changing scientific advances—like mRNA vaccine technology—better or more quickly than the research community has done so far? We don’t know yet. But Wellcome Trust seems to be betting heavily on Leap: In a press statement announcing the latest round of funding, Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar said the organization expects to allocate about 5% of its future funding to Leap. Wellcome Trust also recently announced it will increase its giving to $21.5 billion for health-related science funding over the next decade. Another $1 billion over five years will go to large-scale, high-impact activities.
