Hi, it’s Ben from the Tony Blair Institute. There is a pressing need for institutional innovation in science and this week we are looking at an exciting new model: Focussed Research Organisations (FROs). This was an idea explored by Dominic Cummings in government and which is already beginning to take-off in the US. We wrote a paper looking at how they might be applied in the UK, along with an all star list including Convergent Research’s Adam Marblestone, Milan Cvitkovic, Anastasia Gamick, The Entrepreneur Network’s Sam Dumitriu and Anton Howes, as well as Henry Fingerhut from TBI. If those of you reading have further ideas though, please do get in touch.
Today, scores of worthwhile scientific endeavours remain unattempted because they do not fit naturally within existing scientific institutions. In fields like green energy, medicine, neurotechnology, and biosecurity, we have mostly given up on institutional innovation in science.
One exception is the UK Biobank: a genetic database for more than half a million people. Despite initial criticism for departing from “standard academic scientific practice” in its structure, it is now among the most influential biomedical initiatives in world history. Over the past decade, 28,000 approved researchers from 86 countries have used its data to publish 4,600 papers and create countless new therapeutics and biotech startups. It is neither a university lab project nor a startup, and could not have been done as either. Rather, it is an independent PLC and registered charity that executes like a startup, led by a technical CEO who also happens to be a Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology.
The UK Biobank highlights a common pattern in translational science: a need for projects that are too big for a single academic lab to do, too complex for a loose, multi-lab collaboration, and not directly profitable enough for a venture-backed startup or industrial R&D project.
If the UK wants to achieve its potential as a leader in scientific and technological innovation, it needs to embrace institutional innovation. It has already made a start with initiatives like founding the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), but it can go even further.
Specifically, Focused Research Organisations (FROs) are a new type of scientific institution designed to fill the gap between academic science and venture-backed startups. They should be part of the UK’s ambitious scientific and technology push.
An Opportunity for Institutional Innovation
FROs are essentially nonprofit tech startups. They fill a gap in the institutional landscape of science: a missing type of organisation for large-scale, tightly coordinated, non-profit projects.
In brief, the defining features of an FRO are that:
They are led by a full-time founding team of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs.
They consist of a larger-than-academic-scale team of 10 to 30 (or even more) interdisciplinary scientists, engineers, and project managers.
They are “focused” in that they have specific, quantifiable technical milestones they must achieve rather than doing blue-sky research.
They produce high-impact public goods for science and technology—massive datasets, next-generation research hardware, open-source production protocols, etc.—rather than trying to capture value from a marketable product
They are finite-duration (5-7 year) efforts to avoid mission creep and preserve focus
As they near completion, they actively translate what they have built into one or more venture-backed startup spinouts and/or longer-lived nonprofits.
Extant FROs
Today, three FROs have been launched, each funded in the tens of millions USD, all in the US. To date, all have been funded by private philanthropy, but they can just as easily be funded by a governmental entity like UKRI or through a public-private partnership.
These three orgs are:
E11 Bio, whose mission is to build the key tools needed to map the connections between every neuron in a mammalian brain. If successful, this will lead to new treatments for brain disorders, new experimental paradigms in neuroscience and new applications in brain-inspired computing
Cultivarium, who are seeking to build an end-to-end toolkit for cultivating currently-unculturable microbes. This would accelerate the study and engineering of microorganisms for applications in medicine, carbon removal, and beyond
Rejuvenome, who are conducting the largest study of ageing in animals ever performed. This would end up providing the field of ageing research a gold-standard dataset on which to base future work.
Focused Research Organisations in the UK
The UK’s strong scientific and entrepreneurial talent base position it to take full advantage of the FRO model, with unique opportunities to specialise in biomedicine and net-zero carbon technologies.
However, despite some previous efforts by Boris Johnson’s ex Adviser, Dominic Cummings, this failed. This was in his view, partly a result of Treasury conservatism and a lack of interest by Conservatives.
There are little signs that the political appetite will change with a change of leadership, but in our recent paper with Convergent Research and The Entrepreneurs Network, we put forward some ideas where the UK might lead the field.
They include biomedicine, where the potential of the NHS for biomedical research is extraordinary and unique to the UK. Its size, centralised approval processes, and consistency in data and standard of care make it possible to run biomedical projects in the UK that could not be run elsewhere.
Some of the ideas we put forward include: metagenomic sequencing, where waterways and wastewater are ubiquitously and continuously sampled and watched for any exponentially spreading DNA or RNA sequence; pandemic "practice runs" and trying to set new speed records in vaccine or drug development, manufacturing, and distribution; and augmenting the Biobank dataset by adding first-degree relatives of participants. The causal understanding gleaned from a first-degree relative study at this scale would revolutionise genetic science, just as randomised controlled trials revolutionised medicine and epidemiology.
Similarly, in climate tech the UK could have a huge opportunity. For example, oceanic carbon sequestration i.e. ways to store carbon dioxide in the sea, which carries significant “unknown unknown” risks, making an FRO better suited to the task than a startup was one suggestion. Geothermal and clean meat were others.
Coming up with areas to explore was half of the fun and in writing the paper some got very carried away with trying to name these – for oceanic carbon sequestration the grandiose Cascadia (after the subduction zone off the coast of North America - the accompanying picture is a DALL-E generating image of it in the style of Van Gogh) was mooted by way of example.
New ideas to explore
The point of this being: FROs present an exciting opportunity. They can give UK entrepreneurs, scientists, and engineers a new path for developing transformative technologies, one that fills a vacant niche in the existing science and technology translation ecosystem.
The government can play a leading role here. They have recognised that the existing process of funding science isn't working as well as it could, taking steps such as launching a review into Scientific Bureaucracy and founding ARIA. Such initiatives are laudable, but they alone are not a complete solution to the structural barriers that plague scientific research and early-stage technology development. To this end, ARIA or UKRI should experiment with deploying their capital in the form of FROs.
But so too can many of you play a role. We built out some ideas, but we’re pretty sure you or your network have some important ideas that need exploring. You also probably have better ideas for names. So we’re asking for people to put forward their ideas. TBI and The Entrepreneurs Network are strong advocates of the idea, but please do get in touch with Convergent Research if you're interested in founding, funding, or joining a FRO, or just learning more. The UK is a great place to experiment with how science is organised. And we need people to help us push the boundaries.