Wellcome Leap Inc. Additional Funding to Main Award

In the 2020 Wellcome Leap Strategic Plan, we outlined a possibility – that inspired by the successes of DARPA, we could create a new organization capable of delivering more breakthroughs in human health. Faster. The first ever global version of DARPA with the kind of outsized impact in human health that DARPA has had on National Security. Over 6 decades, DARPA breakthroughs have fueled new markets, new technology, protected National Security and even made some of the pivotal investments in mRNA vaccines that helped to enable pandemic response. It is a high bar. Since formation, Wellcome Leap has met or exceeded all the goals set for the organization and it has done so not in 5 years, but in 3. Indeed, we have cleared every major obstacle to making this possibility a reality. Necessarily, the organization will need to improve and adapt continuously over time based on experience, execution, and feedback. It is, arguably, a noble start. But there is much more to do to achieve persistence and scale. The Wellcome Leap Board of Directors believes that one of the key aspects of this funding request is that it be sustained over the next 5 years. This will allow the organization to steady operations and signals Wellcome’s commitment to both the team and the research community. It also allows the building of appropriate depth of talent in the organization to enable future succession planning and thus begin to mitigate one of Leap’s key risks.