The Burroughs Wellcome Fund (BWF) is an independent private foundation dedicated to advancing the biomedical sciences by supporting research and other scientific and educational activities.
We spoke with Enriqueta C. Bond, PhD, president of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund since 1994. Also interviewed was Nancy S. Sung, PhD, a senior program officer with BWF. Dr. Sung oversees the focus areas of translational research and interfaces in science. These areas include programs ranging from individual bridging awards for postdoctoral fellows to midcareer awards for clinical investigators. Dr. Sung currently chairs the Health Research Alliance, a growing consortium of private foundations and voluntary health agencies with a shared interest in fostering basic science discoveries and removing barriers that prevent them from being translated into clinical studies and improvements in health care. Kathryn N. Ahlport, MSPH, is program manager of the Health Research Alliance and is responsible for strategic planning for the organization and for managing the day-to-day operations of the Alliance and its working groups.
JIM: The Burroughs Wellcome Fund has sustained a long commitment to research in the medical sciences. Although most investigators know of the existence of your foundation, the scope of activities that the BWF supports is not as widely appreciated. Please give a sense of the breadth of BWF programs that are dedicated to the promotion of the medical sciences, particularly in the area of clinical research.
Bond: The Burroughs Wellcome Fund has been in existence for 50 years. We celebrated our 50-year anniversary this May 25th. We started out as the corporate foundation for the Burroughs Wellcome Company, which was totally owned by the Wellcome Trust, the UK counterpart to the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. The Trust began to sell the company publicly in the late 1980s due to the trustees' apprehension about holding only one company, and so it endowed the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. We received $400 million over a period of 5 years from the Trust; added to the $30 million that BWF previously had received from the company, the gift brought the Fund's total endowment to approximately $430 million. During the 5-year period, Burroughs Wellcome Co. was sold totally and became Glaxo Wellcome. We were spun off and no longer have any relation with any company but exist now as a private, independent foundation, with an endowment hovering around $650 million. There is a lot of confusion about that point, and I know we are often approached as a company sponsor rather than as a private foundation.
Our mission is to advance the medical sciences through support of research and education, and our Board of Directors has agreed that the major strategy that we use to carry out that mission is to support people. We support people rather than research or infrastructure per se. We have five different grant programs, through which we award about $25 million to $30 million a year in funding. One program, the “Career Awards in the Biomedical Sciences,” provides bridging awards of $500,000 over a period of 5 years to support people through the last year of their postdoctoral training and into the early years of their professorship. This is a generic award. We also look for physician-scientists who are working on medical research, and generally we give half of the awards to physician-scientists and half of the awards to PhDs. This program has been in existence for about 10 years. Approximately 200 people have been supported by this bridging award mechanism, and we view it as our flagship program.
The second program is the “Career Awards at the Scientific Interface.” In this program, we use the same kind of bridging award to stimulate people who are well trained in physics, mathematics, and the computational sciences to ask biological questions. This program started out as providing support for institutional training programs but later was changed to an individual bridging award.
The third program descended from a long history of support for research in infectious diseases. Company cofounder Henry Wellcome himself was very interested in tropical medicine, so, early on, when we were still a corporate foundation, we provided support in the area of parasitology. That program has evolved into one that supports research dealing with the host-pathogen interface. This program also is open to physicians as well as to PhDs. More recently, we have begun trying to draw researchers from the veterinary medicine community into the area because we now know that many infectious diseases have a basis in the animal reservoir. This award is for 5 years at $400,000 at the assistant professor level.
The fourth program we have at BWF supports science and mathematics at the pre-K-12 level in North Carolina, the home base for our foundation. It is also based on this “pipeline of human capital” philosophy that drives the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. We started out with a program that supported hands-on experiences for middle and high school students, and we very quickly found out that we needed to be engaged in the activities of policy and in partnerships that help us advocate and champion science education. The nation's research community currently depends heavily on foreign nationals in our postdoctoral pool, and we would like to make sure that some of our own North Carolinians are selecting careers in science.
A final program supports researchers who are conducting what we call translational research. This program also has deep roots in BWF—the foundation for many years supported a scholar-level award in the area of clinical pharmacology. That program has evolved during our 50-year history of BWF into experimental therapeutics and now into this translational award. The current award, “Clinical Scientist Award in Translational Research,” is for 5 years at $750,000 and is largely targeted at individuals as their careers transition to the associate and full professor levels.
Sung: Concerning the scope of activities and the breadth of our programs in clinical research, one picture that we like to use is of a continuum going from basic science and laboratory-based work to animal studies, to preclinical work, to clinical trials, and then into outcomes and health services research (Figure 1). When you look at that continuum going from left to right, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund is primarily positioned on the left end. Most of the people that we support conduct laboratory-based discovery research. The translational research that Dr. Bond alluded to is really our furthest foray toward the other end of this continuum. We want to support people who are clinically trained and can develop hypotheses based on their clinical experience and based on what they know of basic science in order to support that iterative flow of information from the bench to the bedside and back. This is what we are hoping to accomplish with our translational research award program. In addition, we support other activities that will serve to bolster the careers of such people. We are aware of all the disincentives they face in the academic health centers. We want to not only provide grant money but also address issues in the environment in which they work.
JIM: Burroughs Wellcome Fund has had a long history of funding areas of research in areas of infectious disease that it considered neglected. In recent years, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund has moved from funding research in specific diseases, such as malaria, to broader topic areas. What has fueled this shift in focus? How is the timing of such shifts determined?
Bond: The Fund had a long period of investment in parasitology research areas when we believed that molecular techniques could be brought to bear in order to advance the field. We made a similar type of commitment in the area of mycology. As you have noted, we have now changed this program into one that is more broadly focused on the host-pathogen interface. Although we still fund people who are working in parasitology and mycology, our belief is that science is shifting from a “bug-by-bug” study into much more of a systems approach. We believe that we will learn a lot more by looking at this host-pathogen interface. In addition, the science has come to the point that we have enough individual “bug” details to begin to shift the paradigm.
Every 5 years we take the time to step back, look at our mission, look at our programs, and ask if we are still relevant. What is happening in science, and where can we make a difference? We view ourselves as very much a niche player.
We have a very active board at the Fund, drawn from the best people in science and medicine. Every 5 years we take the time to step back, look at our mission, look at our programs, and ask if we are still relevant. What is happening in science, and where can we make a difference? We view ourselves as very much a niche player. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) now has an annual budget of more than $30 billion, and the pharmaceutical industry invests more than $30 billion in research each year. The Burroughs Wellcome Fund is giving away $25 million to $30 million per year, so, to have an impact, we really must carefully choose our areas. With the help of our scientific advisory committees, we look each year at what our programs are doing and what is changing in the field. We feel that we need to keep moving or tweaking our programs to take advantage of what is happening scientifically. For example, in the interface area that Dr. Sung has been working on over the years, we felt very strongly that by bringing physicists and mathematicians and chemists to ask biological questions, we could really infuse this field with new ideas and approaches. The most interesting questions are at the interface of the disciplines, making this a very valuable area to support. We are always looking for that kind of niche, and we try to do this very deliberately every 5 years.
JIM: What is the “Interfaces in Science” program, and how does it mesh with the strategy of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to identify and develop specific areas that are un- or underdeveloped by other existing funding mechanisms?
Sung: In the mid-nineties, when our endowment was growing with the infusion of dollars from the Wellcome Trust, the board saw that biology was becoming data rich and was theory poor and felt that within a short time we would be in need of a cadre of investigators who could speak the language of theory and computation as well as the language of biology. The board members behind this were Dan Nathans, who was at Johns Hopkins University, and David Kipnis at Washington University. They also recognized that there were no “habitats” within universities yet for these people to be trained and their careers nurtured. Therefore, we began by funding institutional training programs in 10 different programs across the country. None of the programs was the same; they all were working off different models based on their institutional strengths. In essence, we wanted to run an experiment to determine how best to achieve this sort of interdisciplinary training and to award the funds to those groups who proposed to address most thoughtfully the language barriers between these fields. Now, 9 years later, such habitats are in place at many universities—there are interdisciplinary centers springing up all over the place. So, 4 years ago, we returned to our core strategy of funding individual investigators. We began to fund individual postdoctoral researchers with backgrounds in physics, mathematics, computation, and engineering and who wanted to take their backgrounds and direct them to important biological questions. One of our goals in funding those institutional programs was to prove the principle that this sort of training was needed and valuable—the value is demonstrated by the great jobs that program graduates are landing in. We also hoped that other funders would recognize this and fund this sort of training to a greater degree than we were able to. For example, the NIH and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) have just recently launched a joint program that drew on some of our “lessons learned.” We are very pleased to see this happening.
We want to identify where the gaps and challenges are and position ourselves in that landscape.
JIM: How do you see the mission of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and its relations with other funding agencies, particularly the NIH? To what extent are the missions synergistic? Complementary?
Bond: We see ourselves as a niche player and basically in the people business, where our dollars are best invested. We try to find those individuals who we think are going to be future leaders in the scientific enterprise and try to provide them with flexible funding that will permit them to take some risks and permit them to establish their careers. We obviously work very closely with other funding agencies, both on the government and on the private side. To that end, we've been trying to convene this community over the past 8 years to talk about what the public sector can do well and what the private sector can do well. We want to identify where the gaps and challenges are and position ourselves in that landscape. Although we have to rely on the larger funders to provide the basic infrastructure for the scientific enterprise, we can work to facilitate new leading-edge initiatives. BWF can provide the risk capital in the system, but we very much value partnering with other funding agencies to advance research.
Sung: In addition to our grants that provide research and salary support, we have put together a number of other activities that we feel add value to those awards. In our convening events, we bring all our awardees together and ask them what they need for the next stage in their careers. Then we provide them with tools and with input. An example of this is the laboratory management course organized jointly by the Fund and HHMI. We feel that these convening activities are complementary to what the federal government can do and that we can be—and should be—more agile in the way we respond to the career development needs of our community. There are things that the private foundations can do more easily than the government. We are trying to identify those areas and to take action on them. Hopefully, our efforts will benefit the community we are funding in a unique way as opposed to just duplicating what the federal government is doing.
JIM: A great deal of effort has gone into the development of specific programs by different private foundations. What is the Health Research Alliance?
Sung: One of the things that we have made a priority over a number of years is not to just operate in isolation but to identify those other funders with whom we share common ground. There are a number of them—private foundations, as well as voluntary health agencies. The beauty of the private sector is its individuality. All of these organizations are very distinct, with distinct roots. It is often said that if you have seen one private foundation, you have seen one private foundation. There are, however, a lot of things we can do together and learn from one another so that what we do is more effective across the board. We have sensed a growing momentum over the past couple of years with a number of these funders—particularly in the area of health research—to work together in a more formal way.
Ahlport: The Burroughs Wellcome Fund is playing a pivotal role as the catalyst in the creation of the Health Research Alliance, providing 2 years of infrastructure support as this brand new consortium begins to operate. The Alliance includes a variety of different nongovernmental not-for-profit funders, including voluntary health agencies, private foundations, and operating foundations. They have convened to address issues with a common voice and to support the rapid translation of biomedical discoveries into applications that improve health. It is a unique forum because there are not many organized opportunities for voluntary health agencies oriented toward specific diseases, foundations oriented toward a wider variety of illnesses, and foundations supporting individual investigators to work together to address issues common to all.
JIM: How will the Health Research Alliance further the goals of the participating members?
Ahlport: The Alliance wants to provide members the opportunity to share their experiences, best practices, methods of program evaluation, and aspects of grants administration in order to help these organizations achieve their objectives more efficiently and more effectively. One early area of collaboration is developing consolidated information on the impact of health research funding by nongovernmental grant makers. There is no central repository like the NIH Computer Retrieval of Information on Scientific Projects (CRISP) for nongovernmental health research awards, and one of the first tasks on our list is to develop that kind of database. A future area of endeavor will be exploring opportunities to speed the translation of biomedical discoveries into clinical applications. We do not yet know exactly how we will be able to be helpful in that area, but it is definitely a common interest.
Sung: Another aspect is program evaluation. Currently, there is not much of a literature on evaluation career development programs for clinical investigators. A number of our Health Research Alliance participants support programs like this and are eager to learn what works and what does not. One of the early projects of the Alliance was to put together an award “template.” We took all of our best ideas and put together an award that we felt had all of the features needed to nurture the early career of a new clinical investigator. A number of the agencies have now implemented that template into new award programs. We now want to examine which components of that program really made a difference so that they can be continued. For example, one of the agencies pioneered the idea of paying mentors for their time, paid from a portion of the grant to a trainee. Now we are asking whether that really made a difference, or would that mentoring have happened without that extra funding? Another example is loan repayment—does it really make a difference? For some of these components, it is too early to tell, but I think there is going to be a lot of very useful information that we would not have had if we had not been collaborating and communicating along the way.
JIM: How will this initiative interface with existing programs, such as the NIH CRISP database?
Ahlport: We are certainly hoping that this database will not be intuitively dissimilar to the CRISP database for users. We have begun conversations with the NIH on how we might work together on these two databases, as well as on some broader issues of interest to the group. We are just now getting started building our database, but we certainly are taking into account how CRISP looks and feels. We want to make sure that there are some data elements in our database that are common with NIH so that we can cross-reference awardees who may appear in both databases.
One of the key objectives in establishing this database is defining the landscape of private funding of health research. We anticipate beginning to implement the database a few months from now. The lead on this project is being taken by the American Cancer Society, one of the organizations that has been a key player in creating the Alliance.
JIM: Do you have any final comments?
Bond: We are always looking for good applicants for our programs. We encourage potential applicants who are thinking about a particular funder to take the time to go to that funder's Web site and really look at the guidelines so that they do not waste their time. Our staff members are happy to answer any questions about our program guidelines, and we are delighted that we generally have the very best applicants for our programs.
Burroughs Wellcome Fund Grant Programs (http://www.bwfund.org/programs/)
Career Awards in the Biomedical Sciences (CABS)
http://www.bwfund.org/programs/biomedical_sciences/career_awards_main.html
These grants are intended to foster the development and productivity of early-career biomedical researchers and help them make the critical transition to becoming independent investigators.
Career Awards at the Scientific Interface
http://www.bwfund.org/programs/interfaces/index.html
These grants are intended to foster the early career development of researchers with backgrounds in the physical/computational sciences whose work addresses biological questions and who are dedicated to pursuing a career in academic research.
Investigators in Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease
http://www.bwfund.org/programs/infectious_disease/index.html
The goal of the program is to provide new opportunities for accomplished investigators still early in their careers to study pathogenesis, with a focus on the intersection of human and pathogen biology. The program is intended to shed light on the overarching issues of how human hosts handle infectious challenge.
Science Education
http://www.bwfund.org/programs/science_education/index.html
This group of programs provides over $1 million annually to support creative science education activities for middle school and high school students in North Carolina.
Clinical Scientist Awards in Translational Research
http://www.bwfund.org/programs/translational/clinical_scientists_main.html
These awards are designed to foster the productivity of independent physician-scientists at the midcareer level who will strengthen translational research in academic health centers, both through their own studies as well as their mentoring of the next generation of physician-scientist trainees.