Wellcome Leap builds bold, unconventional programs, and funds them at scale.

Programs that aim to deliver breakthroughs in human health over 5 – 10 years and demonstrate seemingly impossible results on seemingly impossible timelines. Wellcome Leap is a global ARPA for health.

Programs.

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Just as Sputnik ignited the Space Age, so too could the coronavirus inspire

The Health Age.

The right time.

On October 4, 1957, a beach-ball-sized satellite we know as Sputnik was launched into orbit. It inspired a new curiosity about a new frontier.

Sputnik was an inflection point. It led to one of the greatest periods of advancement in science and engineering in history.

The global pandemic has laid bare how much there is to do in health, from policy to equity to financing. But it has also revealed the difference a scientific breakthrough makes. We need more breakthroughs and we need them faster.

Just as Sputnik ignited the Space Age, so, too, might the coronavirus inspire a Health Age. Not just to defeat future pandemics, but to make urgent progress on cancer, mental health, and more.

The right model.

Wellcome Leap is built on a unique model of innovation practiced at DARPA.

For more than six decades, this model has been an uninterrupted engine of breakthrough innovation. It is not a discovery science model, but neither is it a pure application model. It sits firmly at the intersection of the two.

Work in what we call Pasteur’s Quadrant demands that we set ambitious goals that are measurable and testable. So that we’ll know if we succeeded or failed. It requires that we intersect life sciences and engineering, so that we can demonstrate advances at convincing scale — because that’s how an idea once thought impossible, is seen as possible.

The Wellcome Leap Health Breakthrough Network.

A global network dedicated to accelerating breakthroughs in human health.

Now over 100 organizations on 6 continents, representing more than 1,000,000 researchers.

The largest, most rapidly 'activatable' research network in the world.

This kind of work is hard.
The hard is what makes it great.

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