The Burrill Report

It’s been more than 30 years since Richard Nixon declared war on cancer. While there have been many significant discoveries since then, progress overall has been disappointing. To a large degree, this is because our offensive has been held in check by incrementalism. The primary funding source for biomedical research, the National Institutes of Health, prefers funding surefire experiments to risky ones even if they might lead to significant results.

One of the key lessons I’ve learned from more than 20 years backing information technology companies is that outsize reward cannot be achieved without risk. I have also learned that young people are the most likely to take the risks involved in the kind of wild new ideas that lead to major breakthroughs.

Despite the fact that the vast majority of Nobel laureates in medicine conceived their award-winning ideas before the age of 40, very little funding is made available to young investigators pursuing high-risk research. It is well known that the NIH selects projects to fund in a very risk-averse way and that projects are not supported until there is sufficient preliminary data to prove that the research is likely to be successful. Four out of every five new applications to the NIH are rejected.

It’s even harder for young investigators without track records to get funding. Only 6 percent of grant funds go to first-time recipients, and the average age for these new awardees has gone from 37 in 1980 to 42 in 2004. Imagine attaining independence in your career for the first time at 42, well past your outrageous-innovation prime.

This year, the NIH will spend nearly $15 billion on about 30,000 research projects around the country. Very little of this funding will be directed at high-risk research conducted by young people. In fact, the NIH just announced a new program to fund young investigators, but chose only 14 across the entire spectrum of biomedical research?a drop in the bucket.

To accelerate progress, we need to encourage young people who have the courage to break with the pack and the vision to take science in wholly new directions. As a venture capitalist, I know the value of seeding visionaries and how it can revolutionize entire fields. We need to stop focusing on batting averages and more on sluggers.

Having been hit hard by cancer, my wife Debra and I are committed to applying venture capital philosophy to cancer research. We partnered with the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, an internationally respected cancer charity, to develop a program to provide seed funding to early-career investigators with high-risk ideas with the potential to significantly affect our understanding of cancer and approaches to its prevention, diagnosis and treatment. We will provide them with three years of funding to develop ideas and collect supporting data so that, if successful, they can attract additional funding from traditional sources in order to see their ideas to fruition.

To help identify candidates, we have assembled a group of leading scientists who themselves conceived breakthrough ideas at a young age and know how hard it is to get money for outside-of-the-box ideas. They have backgrounds in many scientific disciplines and come from both academia and industry, increasing the likelihood that they will be open to a broad spectrum of new ideas.

Our goal is to give brilliant young scientists the opportunity to become the pioneers of their era. We will view this initiative as a huge success if only one of our awardees makes a breakthrough discovery. We hope our strategy will encourage others to develop creative partnerships and approaches to help accelerate progress.

A world-class researcher recently told me that one of his early grant proposals was rejected simply because “some of his experiments might fail.” If Thomas Edison had been thinking that way, we’d all still be in the dark.

Andrew Rachleff is a partner with Menlo Park, California-based Benchmark Capital and a lecturer in entrepreneurship at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

The Journal of Life Sciences welcomes commentaries. To submit a piece, contact Daniel S. Levine at daniel.levine@blsmg.com or 415-591-5449.

May 07, 2007
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-next_gen_nobels.html