# Forty-eight-hour small grants for bold experiments in neglected cancers

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-fast-grants-oncology/  
OnCo record `idea-fund-fast-grants-oncology` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Fast grants for oncology would be a fund that decides within two days on small grants for quick, decisive experiments in cancers or questions that mainstream funders neglect, modelled on the pandemic-era Fast Grants.

## Summary

Fast Grants during COVID-19 funded hundreds of projects with 48-hour decisions and a one-page application; several delivered results, and recipients reported that speed, not just money, changed what they attempted. A cancer version would target neglected cancers and unfashionable questions (cachexia, metastasis models, surgical technique, repurposed drugs) with awards of $10,000 to $500,000, pre-registration of the key experiment, and a public results record including failures.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: Fast, small grants targeted at neglected areas produce at least as many follow-on funded projects and published results per dollar as conventional awards, with a median time from idea to first data of under six months.
- Rationale: Fast Grants surveys found that most recipients would change their research direction if funding were flexible and fast; conventional cycles take a year from idea to money. Small, quick tests are the right instrument for exploratory work in areas where there is little prior art to justify a big grant.
- Proposed test: Run the fund for two years, tracking time to first result, publication and follow-on funding rates, and compare with a matched sample of conventional small grants from the same funder.
- Maturity: speculative
- Actor: philanthropy

## Sources

- Fast Grants: https://fastgrants.org/

## Connected records

- ideas: [A phase 0 fund to test academic compounds in humans with microdoses and imaging](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-phase-zero-fund/), [Partial lottery funding for good proposals in under-funded cancers](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-neglected-cancer-lottery/)
- bottlenecks: [Funding follows fashion, not burden](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-funding-allocation/), [The valley of death between lab and product](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-translational-valley/)

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