Get grants fast, fail fast: Group to scientists

BENGALURU: It typically takes over two years for scientists to receive a research grant, no matter how brilliant the idea is. To beat this delay, and realising the urgency of scientific innovations, especially during the Covid pandemic, a Bengaluru-based non-profit scientific research institute — launched by Nobel Laureate Venki Ramakrishnan last year — has come up with the ‘Fast Grant’ system, where projects are approved and grants cleared within a month of their proposal to let scientists try their ideas faster, leading to higher success rates.

Co-founder of the institute, Ignite Life Sciences Foundation (Ignite LSF), Dr Shahid Jameel, told The New Indian Express, “Innovation never comes from ‘safe science’… It usually comes from a paradigm shift. Through the Fast Grant system, we approve a project in a month of its proposal and provide a grant of less than Rs 50 lakh to fast-track ideas. The projects would definitely be high risk and high reward. We know we will have high-failure rates, but the idea is to fail quickly. If you have to fail then fail fast.”

The research time-frame will be one-and-a-half years, and “we want people to test all those crazy ideas. We have just rolled out the ‘Fast Grant’ system and we are looking forward for new proposals,” said Dr Jameel, who is also a former head of Indian SARS-CoV-2 Consortium on Genomics (INSACOG).Biocon Executive Chairperson Dr Kiran Mazumdar Shaw has come forward to fund Ignite LSF’s research on developing an RNA vaccine platform which is non-existent in India. Ignite is expecting similar funding from other organisations.

A pre-print paper, ‘Knowledge production and translation of science between Academia and Industry: Assessing the impact of R&D in India’, published in a medical journal ‘BioRXiv’ by researchers from Bengaluru highlights the academia-industrial collaboration’s key role in transforming basic research into real-world applications. The study, whose main author is Dr Vishal Rao, Regional Director, Head Neck Surgical Oncology, HCG Cancer Centre, lists out the government’s role in making necessary policy changes to make the collaboration successful.

“This paper highlights the significance of investing in R&D to improve the productivity of a nation, as also the need to design policies to strengthen the applied research environment by fostering solution-centric collaborations between academia and industry. Most advanced countries have significant private investments too in science which is lacking in India,” it states.