Wellcome Leap, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit established in 2020 by the Wellcome Trust, has announced an additional $335 million investment from the London-based health foundation.

Founded with $300 million in initial funding from the Wellcome Trust, Wellcome Leap targets complex human health challenges with the goal of achieving breakthrough scientific and technological solutions over five to 10 years. To date, Leap has launched five programs, tripled the size of its global network, which includes more than 650,000 scientists and engineers, and recruited program managers from four countries. Driven by the new funding, Wellcome Leap will work to build a “Health Age” that accelerates fundamental mechanistic understanding of health and disease; change levels of time, money, and risk in the development of diagnostics, treatments, and prevention; and improve access by shifting speed, scale, and equity in delivery globally.

“The last two years have laid bare how much work we have to do in health, equity, and care for the planet. They have also revealed the difference a breakthrough makes,” said Wellcome Leap CEO Regina E. Dugan. “We need more breakthroughs to solve the urgent challenges facing the world. And we need them faster.”

“Support for long-term, basic science is vital,” said Wellcome Trust director Jeremy Farrar. “We founded Wellcome Leap because we also need to ensure that somewhere in the system there is a truly disruptive element that can take bigger risks, challenge the consensus point of view, and work globally to find the best talent and ideas to push forward. We expect to allocate about 5 percent of our funding into the future to Wellcome Leap as a complement to our other investments. Since its inception, Wellcome Leap has hit the ground running with ambitious programs that seek to deliver transformative results from mRNA production to mental health and physiology. Bold initiatives like these are key to maintaining the momentum of the last two years. We couldn’t be more delighted, or impressed, with the work to date.”

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