Creating the conditions for discoveries to improve health: our vision for Discovery Research

Discovery is a golden thread that’s woven through Wellcome’s history.

It’s something we celebrate. It’s something we’re proud of. And it’s thanks to everything we’ve done before that we can see how things need to change to improve health in the future.

New knowledge can transform life, health and wellbeing in ways we can’t always anticipate today. We don’t know where the next breakthrough will come from. 

So continuing to support great ideas is essential. But that alone isn’t enough. 

My vision for Discovery Research at Wellcome combines great ideas with the right conditions for discovery.

Short-term goals in research are stifling ambition. So we’re giving researchers, particularly those at earlier stages of their career, time and freedom for discovery and encouraging them to take on ambitious problems.

One of our superpowers is breadth. We fund research from atoms and molecules to population health and social sciences. Discovery research can be done in a laboratory, a library or the clinic – and everywhere in between.

If we’re making the most of this breadth then we’re seeding and encouraging interactions between all these fields, disciplines and career stages.

I want to see us celebrating the power of collaboration and teamwork to solve the big challenges in research and influencing how science is done. We believe diversity of people and expertise leads to richer understanding and more impactful discoveries.

It’s inspiring to see the great ideas that researchers bring to us to fund.

But we also acknowledge the barriers and bottlenecks faced by people and fields. And a big part of our vision is to remove these and even open new fields of research.

Take the development of tools, methodologies and technologies as an example. They’re often seen as hypothesis generating, rather than hypothesis driven. In the past we’ve struggled to support them.

Our Discovery Research Platforms are one example of how we’re changing that through longer-term funding. The Platforms bring together researchers, teams and collaborators to address a range of practical, technological and methodological barriers that are holding up progress.

In fields such as bioimaging and genomics, where Wellcome has long-standing interest and investment, we’re directing targeted funding to give those fields a boost. We’re working in this way to address challenges in these fields, which might range from high infrastructure costs through to technical hurdles like data processing – and much more.

We also remain committed to a small number of long-term, large-scale investments, including the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the Francis Crick Institute and UK Biobank.

Through all of this I see the potential for a better research environment. One where barriers and bottlenecks are removed, both for the diverse group of researchers we believe are needed to improve health and in developing the tools and infrastructure necessary to achieve our goals.

Our commitment to research culture plays an important part in this. And it also involves building a community of discoverers.

We learn a huge amount from feedback we receive from the research community. And we can only realise our vision through discussions, workshops and activities where we bring people together.

This is where the great ideas and the conditions for discovery converge. It’s where new fields open up. And it’s where we see the power of discovery in building a healthier a future for everyone.