What happened when an economics researcher, a bioengineer and a tech entrepreneur joined forces during a pandemic? They envisaged a research-grant system with an form which will be completed in but half-hour , a decision-making process that takes just 48 hours, and funding that arrives within every week — then found out the system in 10 days, using donations from philanthropists.
The scheme, referred to as Fast Grants, launched in April 2020 and received 4,000 applications in its first week. it had been created by Tyler Cowen, an economics researcher at Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia; Patrick Collison, co-founder of online payment processing platform, Stripe; and Patrick Hsu, a bioengineer at the University of California, Berkeley.
Now the trio have released the results of a survey about how the speedy funding benefited scientists’ add the first stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and the way traditional routes of funding could also be overly bureaucratic.
Lethargic response
The conventional process of securing research funding typically takes quite a year; even fast-track schemes can take months. The institutional response to the pandemic “has been lethargic”, write the trio during a blog post about the scheme. They note that in early 2020, they “expected the U.S.’s immense government funding systems to be unleashed, with decisions made in days if not in hours. this is often what happened during war II, which killed fewer Americans.”
Instead, Tyler, Collison and Hsu found that leading scientists were “stuck on hold”, expecting permission from funders to repurpose projects to tackle COVID-19.
In response, they found out Fast Grants, securing quite US$50 million from donors. By the top of 2020, that they had issued 260 grants, mostly to labs within the us , but also in Japan, Australia, Germany and therefore the uk .
Projects were awarded across many topics. One supported research that found saliva swabs worked even as well as nasopharyngeal swabs did for SARS-CoV-2 tests. Others tracked viral variants of concern before the arrival of genomic surveillance systems, and identified misfired immune responses in people with severe COVID-19.
Poor use of time: Results of poll of 80 Fast Grant recipients asked what proportion time they spend on grant applications.
According to a survey of 80 of the grant recipients, 67% said their research wouldn’t are possible without a quick grant, and a few third said it accelerated their work by months.
The data shows that “our current grant system is just too slow, too restrictive and inflexible”, says Cowen, who is additionally the director of Fast Grants. However, he acknowledges the prevailing system has achieved tons in battling COVID, for instance much of the work on mRNA vaccines has been funded by US National Institute of Health grants.
Shahar Avin, a philosopher at the University of Cambridge, UK, agrees, saying that the interest within the scheme and therefore the survey results suggest there’s “significant untapped potential for research”. But one important question to be answered is whether or not the Fast Grants projects “generate results that are as high in quality and impact as more traditional streams”, he says.
