ideasIdea
Forty-eight-hour small grants for bold experiments in neglected cancers
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.
Fast Grants during COVID-19 funded hundreds of projects with 48-hour decisions and a one-page application; several led to important 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.
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.
What would test it
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
Who has to act
philanthropy
Cost to try
Medium ($1M to $50M)
Years to first evidence
2
Bottlenecks it attacks
- Funding follows fashion, not burden · Money goes to the cancers and questions that are easy or popular, not the ones that kill most or where a dollar would do most.
- The valley of death between lab and product · Most academic discoveries die before anyone tests them in people because nobody funds the middle step.