OnCo
ideasIdea

Two-year translational fellowships that pay scientists to develop their own discovery

Postdocs who discover something promising usually have to leave it behind when their contract ends. A fellowship would pay them for two years to turn it into a candidate drug or diagnostic, with mentors from industry.

Fellowships with salary, a project budget of $250,000 to $500,000 and structured mentoring from drug developers, regulatory experts and clinicians, awarded to postdoctoral scientists or clinical fellows to translate a specific finding: target validation, lead optimisation, assay development, prototype device. Fellows are hosted in translational institutes or academic drug discovery units and have the option to found a company or license the asset. Precedents include the Wellcome and MRC translational fellowships, Blavatnik Fellowships and the EMBL-EBI industry programme; oncology lacks a dedicated scheme at scale.

Hypothesis
Translational fellows advance their assets to a defined milestone (validated target, lead series, IND-enabling start, prototype in patients) in at least half of cases, and a third of assets attract follow-on funding or licensing within two years of the fellowship, versus a small minority of comparable unfunded discoveries.
Rationale
Discoveries are stranded because the people who understand them are on short contracts with incentives to publish and move; paying the discoverer to translate is cheaper than paying a company to rediscover. Existing translational fellowship schemes report high rates of spin-out and licensing.
What would test it
Run fifty fellowships over three years and pre-register the milestone and follow-on metrics against a matched cohort of discoveries from the same institutions without fellowship support.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
research
Cost to try
Medium ($1M to $50M)
Years to first evidence
4
Bottlenecks it attacks

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