Wellcome Leap, a nonprofit founded by UK-based Wellcome, has announced a $50 million initiative in support of efforts to bioengineer human tissues, organoids, organs, and platforms that can be used to accelerate and scale new treatments for complex human health challenges.

Established with an initial $300 million investment from Wellcome and modeled on the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Wellcome Leap funds bold, unconventional projects targeting complex human health challenges. The $50 million Program in Human Organs, Physiology, and Engineering (HOPE) wiil focus on two goals: creating a multi-organ platform that recreates human immunological responses with sufficient fidelity to double the predictive value of a preclinical trial with respect to the efficacy, toxicity, and immunogenicity of therapeutic interventions targeting cancer and autoimmune and infectious diseases; and demonstrating the advances needed to restore organ function using cultivated organs or biological/synthetic hybrid systems that double the five-year survival rate of patients on replacement therapy or awaiting organ transplantation. 

To that end, the program is inviting proposals from researchers at university and research institutions, for-profit (including venture-backed) companies, and government or nonprofit research organizations through December 1.

According to Wellcome, about five thousand people die each year waiting for a kidney transplant in the United States alone, while of the more than two million patients with late-stage chronic kidney disease receiving dialysis replacement therapy, only 35 percent survive the wait.

"In the next decade, we have the potential to create fully functioning human organs that pose no rejection risk, said Jay Flatley, chair of Wellcome Leap and former CEO of U.S.-based biotechnology company Illumina. "This program will fund the breakthrough technologies necessary to enable that bold ambition, precisely the type of effort for which Leap was founded."

"While the path to breakthrough discoveries is often unclear, tissue and organ engineering is an area where real progress is possible — if we can bring the best and boldest ideas forward and fund them at scale," said Wellcome director Jeremy Farrar. "Leap was created to support ambitious, high-risk ideas that could fundamentally change global health, and with the launch of this first program we are one step closer to achieving this vision."

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