Wellcome Leap

Wellcome Leap was established to accelerate discovery and innovation for the benefit of human health. Wellcome Leap will build bold, unconventional programmes and fund them at scale. Programmes that target global human health challenges, with the goal of achieving breakthrough scientific and technological solutions within 5-10 years.

With initial funding of £250 million furnished by the Wellcome Trust, Wellcome Leap is led by former U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) director, Regina E. Dugan, and former Illumina CEO, Jay Flatley. Wellcome Leap will operate independently from Wellcome to  encourage speed, agility, and an appetite for risk-taking.

To learn more, visit www.wellcomeleap.org.

Wellcome Leap will aim to deliver breakthroughs that could fundamentally change science and transform human health over five to ten years.

The high-risk nature of this funding approach means that not all goals will be achieved. And we accept and embrace that, as we know that failure is an inherent part of innovation. 

For us, Wellcome Leap will be successful if, by 2030, it has produced a small number of breakthroughs that:

• open up new areas of research and allow new pressing scientific questions to be explored
• change existing practice, theories, concepts, standards or approaches used within a field or scientific area 
• transform how a health problem is addressed 
• are delivered in 5-10 years rather than 20 years
• are picked up for further funding, development or commercialisation. 

By breakthrough we mean a significant development or achievement, such as the production of a new technology, field of science, industry or research community.

Wellcome Leap will take a different funding approach to the rest of Wellcome, and the way ideas are usually funded in the health and life sciences sector. The inspiration for it comes from the technology and venture capital industries – taking on early-stage, high-risk ideas, funding at scale, and making fast and agile decisions across a portfolio of programmes. 

It will apply these principles to a small number of goal-focused programmes in the health and life sciences that will be driven by impact, not commercial return, and will operate in line with Wellcome’s charitable mission. 

Wellcome Leap will support and bring together scientists, technologists and innovators across different disciplines, sectors and communities to work in parallel and solve problems differently. They could be from anywhere in the world – what’s key is their vision and original thinking.

To learn more, visit www.wellcomeleap.org.