Written by: Jasmine Balloch
Edited by: Caroline Babisz & Natasha Barrow
Depending on your line of work, you’ve been hearing the term FRO pop up more and more over the past year or, quite possibly, not at all. FROs, Focused Research Organisations, present a new model for cutting-edge innovation to create high-impact public goods; the model aims to fill a distinct gap between academia, industry and venture creation.
With concrete, time-limited goals fixed from the outset, FROs are positioning themselves as vehicles for ambitious research which requires a resource-intensive and highly streamlined approach, independent of the external pressures faced by startups and labs to commercialise or publish. An example is FRO E11 Bio’s pursuit of making ‘brain connectivity mapping and reconstruction (connectomics) radically faster, cheaper and more accessible’ within a ~5 year building window.
Drawing on the startup model, an FRO is led by a founding team (CEO, CTO, COO, etc.) that goes on to hire a company of interdisciplinary researchers and/or engineers, independent of academia and with the intention of advancing higher-risk research. Output could be in the form of open-access data sets, protocols, tools, research papers, licensing, workshops or spin-outs. FROs don’t restrict founding teams from pursuing venture creation; if tenable after the building window, startups could be spun out of the organisation to further benefit public good output (i.e. the need for a for-profit model to support the distribution of a platform technology).
The delivery mechanism for output will likely vary for each FRO, but a mission-driven focus will remain constant. As biotechs continue to exist at the mercy of boom and bust VC cycles, FROs present a mechanism for entrepreneurial and impact-led teams of scientists to leverage philanthropic resources – echoing the ambitious state-funded projects of mid-20th century US, such as Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) and the development of MIT’s Lincoln laboratory.
FRO, as a concept, also originated out of MIT. Within the Boyden lab, a team of PhDs and research scientists, including future Convergent Research (see below) CEO Dr Adam Marblestone and FutureHouse co-founder Dr Sam Rodriques, developed the idea from a pressing need for new innovation and funding mechanisms to tackle large-scale scientific bottlenecks. Their vision was laid out in an early 2022 Nature Comment article by Marblestone and Convergent Research co-founder Anastasia Gamick, colleague Milan Cvitkov, board member Cheryl Martin, Schmidt Futures CIO Tom Kalil, and Rodriques. The essay helped to attract further philanthropic backing.
Support for the FRO model has, in part, COVID to thank. With the pressing need for capital to unblock life-saving innovations and an ambition to see scientific progress accelerated, in 2020, a host of tech giants (led by Stripe’s Patrick Collison) contributed to a $50M+ Fast Grant fund. A number of grants were distributed less than 48 hours after they were awarded. Curtailing from the Fast Grant initiative, Eric and Wendy Schmidt and their philanthropy arm, Schmidt Futures, supported the creation of Convergent Research - a nonprofit pioneering the model and acting as an incubator of and funding partner to emerging FROs.
Launching in 2021 and now with an initial cohort of 10 US-based FROs, Convergent Research assess FRO proposals, selecting those they deem suitable for the model (they actively discourage proposals which could be achieved via alternative mechanisms). The nonprofit leverages networks of researchers and philanthropists to aid the selection and funding of proposed FROs. The initial US cohort is now halfway through their tenure. Look to Cultivarium for widening access to novel microorganisms through tool expansion and EvE Bio for the mapping of the pharmome to all off-target interactions of small-molecule pharmaceuticals.
The UK’s first FRO launched this January, however, the idea has been in the pipeline for a number of years. Stemming from the academic work of UCL Principal Investigator Dr Gabi Heller, Bind Research aims to revolutionise the drug discovery field for Intrinsically Disordered Proteins (IDPs). Compared to structured proteins, IDPs exist in a dynamic state. Without the stable binding sites of structured proteins, IDPs involved in diseases such as cancers and viral infection (making up ~35% of proteins responsible for the disease pathology) are usually categorised as ‘undruggable’.
Current IDP research is fragmented across academic labs, each of which usually possesses expertise in just one type of IDP. Labs utilise NMR and X-ray Crystallography to study small molecule interaction with IDPs however, these interactions are usually discovered by chance, with most IDPs remaining untargeted. Bind’s ambition is to build ‘tools for any IDP target and increase their throughput by several orders of magnitude to support translational drug discovery’. The company will leverage collaborations with academic labs, using in-cell, biophysical, and computational methods to screen and characterise IDP/small molecule interactions with the intention of developing datasets to support IDP drug discovery.
Convergent Research is an Activation Partner of the UK’s Advanced Reseach + Invention Agency (ARIA), together the organisations aim to support UK-based FROs fitting with ARIA’s
opportunity spaces. Traction is underway in the UK; in February, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology released a shortlist of 12 proposals taken forward for the Research Ventures Catalyst Programme. Four of these are for FROs, all bio-focused. Although not specifically an instrument for life sciences innovation, the FRO model is well suited to the high-risk and operationally-intensive research required to produce biological data and platforms. Based on these early signals, we can expect to see an increasing number of FROs filtering into the UK life sciences ecosystem over the next few years.
As highlighted by Anastasia Gamick during a recent panel at the ARIA Summit, the delivery of technical milestones may achieve the goal of an FRO. However, real success will be seen in any seismic shifts made by the FRO’s output, such as the setting of a gold standard or changing how a whole industry or field operates. FROs must aim for impact via disruption to the status quo.
Convergence Research nods to the Hubble Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN as prime examples of SOTA innovations which could not have been built in VC-backed startups or academic labs. As touched on previously, parallels can be drawn between the FRO model and state-backed innovation originating in WW2 US; built out of MIT, the legacy of the Rad Lab is infamous. The Rad Lab blurred interdisciplinary boundaries, employing physicists, engineers, chemists, economists and more to develop over 100 radar systems, directly leading to $1.5 billion of radar production.
E11 Bio’s release of collaborative research with the laboratories of ‘Sam Rodriques at the Crick Institute, Joergen Kornfeld at Max Planck/LMB Cambridge UK, Ed Boyden at MIT and HHMI’ suggests that cross-institutional collaboration is underway but will interdisciplinary boundaries blur for the better? The FRO model may be ambitious in its scope but a look back at history will remind us that this scale of ambition has been reached before. FROs must manage to work across the field they are serving whilst drawing on external expertise through hiring and interdisciplinary collaboration.
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