Wellcome Trust Seeks 'Talent Scout' CEO For New Fund For Risky Health Ideas
Executive Summary
The foundation's newly formed not-for-profit Leap Fund needs a financially savvy CEO to scour the globe for risky bets that it hopes will transform science and human health, its policy director says.
Fancy yourself a sharp money-manager and good judge of very early cutting-edge innovative ideas that other executives won't touch due to perceived riskiness?
If your answer is 'yes', then the UK-based Wellcome Trust wants to hear from you!
Money Savvy BioMedical 'Talent Scout' Sought
The foundation has just launched a global search for a chief executive to steer its newly formed, not-for-profit Leap Fund which will have £250m for use over an initial five-year period to find the Next Big Idea in biomedicine that would otherwise take longer to advance - or perhaps never even see the light of day.
"We're just starting now to look for the CEO. We will search around the world for the very best person for the role. We want to give that person a lot of authority and decision-making power to take those bets for Wellcome," the trust's head of policy Ed Whiting told Scrip.
"We're looking for a talent scout who can take those big decisions and weigh up scientific risk and by the very nature of that they may be an expert in one area of science - but they are unlikely to be necessarily a research scientist of many decades standing." - Wellcome Trust Policy Head Ed Whiting
With the Leap Fund, Wellcome Trust - the second largest charitable foundation in the world and co-founder of the Human Genome Project - wants to support bold ideas from universities or businesses around the world that would be unlikely to win grants from its own life sciences funding system or from public agencies such as the UK Medical Research Council.
"The idea is to get ideas from the theoretical hypothesis to things that can actually improve health and change the world, and getting to those things faster and giving those people with those great ideas space to develop them and the support that they need to develop them quickly," Ed Whiting said in an interview.
The Leap Fund will not replace or duplicate any of the foundation's current research funding schemes. Those efforts will continue to be supported through Wellcome's Primary Fund, which is set to break through the £1bn level this year.
"With the Leap Fund we're trying to allow ourselves as a trust to take a few bigger bets on higher risk propositions. We know not all of them will work. We'd be happy with a 10% to 20% success rate. But if those leaps do work, they'd enable us to really transform the way science works." - Wellcome Trust Policy Head
Leap funding will instead come from the foundation's separate Reserve Fund, which was established in 2017 to support ambitious programs where Wellcome has the capacity to drive significant progress towards addressing a global health challenge, or to advance science in a specific space within five to ten years.
And, unlike the trust's response-mode grant funding, the Leap Fund will be led by a CEO who will work with the external community to identify the most promising ideas, individuals and teams to back.
"We're looking for a talent scout who can take those big decisions and weigh up scientific risk and by the very nature of that they may be an expert in one area of science - but they are unlikely to be necessarily a research scientist of many decades standing," Whiting told Scrip.
The eventual CEO will have the autonomy to shape the portfolio of programs, take high-risk decisions and reallocate funds as needed to the most promising programs to give the fund the best possible chance of success.
"We think there may be suitable people out there who have experience from the VC universe where you have to constantly make decisions about risk and asset allocation. What we want from that person is to be able to work with a range of other experts to understand where the opportunities are, but then be able to take very clear decisions about what might be the right steps to go forward with on individual bets," he explained.
Whiting, who joined Wellcome Trust in August 2016, was previously private secretary to former UK Prime Minister David Cameron and had worked with Lord O'Neill of Gatley – the ex-chair of Goldman Sachs Asset Management and the man appointed by Cameron to launch and chair a review into the crisis of antibiotic resistance, the last of which was published in May 2016.
Two Examples Where Leap Funding Might Have Helped
He noted two examples of innovations that might have been developed quicker had they had backing from a Leap Fund approach: cryo-electron microscopy used in research for freezing biomolecules to better understand how they work. Another is nanopore DNA sequencing which has the potential to become a direct, fast, and inexpensive DNA sequencing technology.
"With the Leap Fund we're trying to allow ourselves as a trust to take a few bigger bets on higher risk propositions. We know not all of them will work. We'd be happy with a 10% to 20% success rate. But if those leaps do work, they'd enable us to really transform the way science works," Whiting said.
The success rate will ultimately depend largely on the abilities - and luck - of the person eventually chosen as the Leap Fund's CEO.
Their remit will not mean shepherding new biomedical ideas to commercialization, however.
"We don't intend this fund to take a product through from nothing to a late-stage clinical trial because we just don't envisage that sort of capacity," Whiting said.
"What it will enable to happen is that a new idea that only exists in theory to be proven in principle and in practice so that other funders can then help take it through to full translation - and then make its way onto the marketplace."