Wellcome’s new strategy gets extra boost, as organisation makes strongest returns in over two decades

Wellcome is making its biggest funding commitment to science and health in the organisation’s 85-year history, thanks to its strongest investment returns in 25 years.  

With an investment portfolio now worth £38.2 billion, the organisation is planning to raise its charitable spending to £16 billion over the next decade to fund science that supports a healthy future for everyone.  

Wellcome has also committed an extra £750 million to fund large-scale, high-impact activities across five years, which it anticipates will grow to £1 billion next year. 

As a growing organisation, Wellcome wants to scale up in a deliberate and sustainable way, ensuring that it can consistently fund research to improve health in all economic climates. 

The funding is a major boost for Wellcome’s new, more streamlined strategy, which focuses on three worldwide health challenges – mental health, infectious disease, and the health impacts of climate change. Underpinning it all is a broad programme of discovery research, which aims to give researchers the freedom to search for new knowledge. 

Over the past year, the organisation has also significantly increased its global policy and advocacy capacity in order to connect with governments worldwide and drive systemic change. This has included expanding its European presence, through Wellcome's Europe Office in Berlin. 

As part of its new direction, Wellcome will seek to support cross-sector, cutting-edge collaborations. For example, the public-private Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI), which Wellcome co-founded in 2017, has played a pivotal role in pandemic preparedness and the Covid-19 response, bringing together a diverse range of global actors to support Covid-19 vaccine development and equity.  

Wellcome also wants to fund research that has the potential to change the way we understand life. As part of its £150 million commitment to the Covid-19 pandemic, the charity has supported genomics researchers to keep up with the virus. The Wellcome Sanger Institute was at one point responsible for half of the world’s Covid-19 sequencing, and funding genomics research in East Africa has generated the first Covid-19 data in places like South Sudan and Burundi. 

Solving the most urgent health challenges of this century will take time, but Wellcome’s long-term approach will support researchers as they grapple with some of the biggest health questions facing us all.