Sarrin Chethik

@UChi_MSA
Views are my own

[Sarrin Chethik @schethik]

We may iterate on the Atlas, so feedback is welcome. Would you focus on different cruxes than problem/solution clarity and confidence in identifying the best team? Are private information and interest in encouraging competition better heuristics? Are we missing funding tools?

[Sarrin Chethik @schethik]

Explore the Atlas of Innovation! We just built an interactive site that helps policymakers / philanthropists / MDBs navigate HOW to best fund science/tech programs. It's built w the idea that the funding tool, such as a prize or grant, has a big impact on a program's success.

[Matt Esche @matthewesche]

At @IFP, we’ve spent the past 3 years thinking about all the different ways the US government & philanthropy fund R&D.

Until now, R&D funders haven’t had a systematic way to match the innovation problem to the right funding tool.

We built THE ATLAS OF INNOVATION to fill that gap.

https://t.co/XZshJ7pr1f

Alongside @UChi_MSA, we’ve boiled down thousands of hours of research into a handful of questions covering how much the R&D funder knows about:
- the problem they want to solve
- the solution it should have
- the team that should build the solution

Why the Atlas matters:

The US government spends close to $200 billion every year on R&D. And after the Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs, there will be hundreds of billions of dollars in new philanthropic giving.

Choosing the correct funding approach to the social problems they’re trying to solve will mean the difference between success and failure.

For example, NSF research grants have helped seed breakthroughs from MRI machines to search engines, but grants aren’t built to deliver the kind of industrial speed and scale that a project like Operation Warp Speed required.

Picking the wrong funding approach can leave programs behind schedule, over budget, or without anything to show for all the money they spent.

How we built the Atlas:

1. We began by creating a matrix of dozens of considerations that a thoughtful policymaker or funder would ideally weigh before deciding how to fund a project.

2. We looked at every major funding approach, from grants to R&D tax credits to advance market commitments, analyzing when they work well and when they fail to meet the mission.

3. We spent months deep in the weeds of contract theory and incentive design, looking at historical examples and the state-of-the-art research in innovation economics.

4. We then worked to turn that research into a tool that time-strapped policymakers and philanthropic funders could rely on at the start of an innovation funding cycle.

5. Three years later, we are launching just that: a new (and visually stunning) website to help funders decide how to best incentivize innovation. And all they have to know… is what they currently know about their innovation goal! The Atlas takes care of the rest.

How to navigate the Atlas:

Answer questions about your goal to find the funding approach aligned with the information you have.

Each funding mechanism has its purpose for particular technologies and specific moments in development.

There shouldn’t be an ARPA for every field, just like we don’t need a prize or AMC for every innovation. The Atlas helps you navigate those tradeoffs.

[Sarrin Chethik @schethik]

Incredible working with @matthewesche, @clairetmcmahon, @siddhharia, Chris Snyder, @calebwatney, @mattsclancy, and the rest of the @IFP team on this!

[Sarrin Chethik @schethik]

@audowla @CGDev @audowla pull funding refers to any outcome-based funding including advance market commitments and prizes. AMCs would be great (pay based on discovery and adoption), but prizes would be useful too (pay just based on discovery)!

[Sarrin Chethik @schethik]

(I understand there's nuance -- fixed costs for setting up a pull fund, concerns about gaming, etc. -- but I still think pull funding may be under-used)

[Sarrin Chethik @schethik]

An implicit argument in some of my recent blog posts: funders often pick between grants and prizes, but why not use both? Fund the teams you believe in. But (might as well) promise to pay someone else if they solve a problem first or better.

[Center for Global Development @CGDev]

What if we paid for results, not just research?

With NIH funding under pressure, @schethik makes the case for “pull” funding to complement existing grants and unlock overlooked treatments like repurposed drugs.

https://t.co/5uULpYxifw

[Sarrin Chethik @schethik]

Companies currently use bug bounties to catch the bugs their software engineers didn't find. Why not use a similar approach for public goods?

[Sarrin Chethik @schethik]

@WSJopinion For those interested, you can read/listen to more about our thinking on drug repurposing here: https://t.co/EF9EPDtkgd (and/or DM me on twitter)

[Sarrin Chethik @schethik]

Also, for those w thoughts, the FDA just announced an RFI on the topic and mentions collaborations with NIH and CMS. Exciting times! https://t.co/CKYJrEPd4N

[Sarrin Chethik @schethik]

There's real momentum building around generic drug repurposing. However, the policy response could be minimal (one or two ad hoc approvals) or broad-based and durable (long-term incentives for development). Chris and I discuss the latter. Gift link below

[Wall Street Journal Opinion @WSJopinion]

You can teach an old drug new tricks. Aspirin prevents heart attacks, and good policy could give other generic drugs a second life, write Christopher Snyder and Sarrin Chethik
https://t.co/rbUUhM5XRE

[Sarrin Chethik @schethik]

https://t.co/xnn1fRsgQf

[Coefficient Giving @coeff_giving]

Promising treatments for some of the world's most neglected diseases may already exist. But because generic medicines cannot be patent-protected, there is little incentive to test them for new uses.

To support generic drug repurposing, we’re launching an RFP: a quick 🧵

[Caleb Watney @calebwatney]

@binarybits Support a focused research organization! Fund a cool clinical trial! Buy out a patent! Expand emergent ventures to a new part of the world! Plenty of options

[Sarrin Chethik @schethik]

Life-saving breakthroughs can come from repurposing existing (generic) drugs, but there's almost no incentive to do so. Grateful to join a thoughtful @Freakonomics discussion on the promise of generic drug repurposing and how innovative funding tools can unlock its potential

[Freakonomics @Freakonomics]

Using an old drug in a brand new way can save patients’ lives. So why aren’t companies doing it?

Because as it turns out, “repurposing” an existing drug has 0 financial upside.

In this episode, guest host Steve Levitt explores what happens when markets fail patients, along with physician-scientist David Fajgenbaum (whose life was saved by a decades-old drug used in a new way) and economist Chris Snyder.

How do you fix a market that doesn’t pay for cures?

This new episode of Freakonomics Radio is available now, wherever you get your podcasts.

https://t.co/FfJ9iQk81z

[Market Shaping Accelerator (MSA) @UChi_MSA]

New G20 High Level Independent Panel  on pandemic preparedness out.

Recommendation 3: Enabling at-risk financing for low and middle income countries to crucial to ensuring low and middle income countries get the vaccines and therapeutics they need during the next outbreak

[Sarrin Chethik @schethik]

7/ Motivated people/orgs surfacing insights from obs data seems useful, but to fully take advantage of this info we need serious funding and smart funding approaches

[Sarrin Chethik @schethik]

1/ Great post on mining Reddit to inform treatment ideas. Lots of promising treatments never get tested bc trials are exp + lacking IP protections. However, this problem is too large for a few altruistic people/orgs to tackle. Instead, we need govt $ to focus on the following 🧵

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Observing some people close to me with chronic health conditions, it's striking how useful Reddit frequently ends up being. I think a core reason is because trials aren’t run for a lot of things, and Reddit provides a kind of emergent intelligence that sits between that which any single physician can marshal and the full rigor of clinical trials.

Why aren’t trials run for a lot of things? Well, they’re of course slow and expensive (median cost of $19M for a pivotal trial in 2015[1]; after adjusting for inflation and other phases, maybe that corresponds to a total of $40M today?). But they’re also hard to fund when the intervention in question lacks IP protection since the ensuing knowledge can’t be monetized. As such, trials for diet, over-the-counter supplements, and lifestyle interventions are under-pursued. To give one prosaic example, lots of people think that magnesium improves sleep, but, as far as I know, no trial has ever been run assessing its ability to improve sleep in non-elderly adults without sleep disorders.

So, Reddit — in a pretty unstructured way — makes a limited kind of “compounding knowledge” possible. Best practices can be noticed and can imperfectly start to accumulate. For people with chronic health problems, this is a big deal, and I’ve heard lots of stories between “I found something that made my condition much more manageable” all the way to “I found a permanent cure in a weird comment buried deep in a thread”. (Of course, one also sees this outside of medical conditions. I’ve enjoyed the recommended routine in the BodyWeightFitness subreddit, as a comparable kind of distilled practical wisdom[2].)

An interesting and somewhat more formalized example of this approach was recently used for long COVID and published earlier this year[3]. After surveying 3,900 individuals, the paper analyzes patient-reported outcomes for 150 different treatments, yielding the figure reproduced below. There are evidently no silver bullets, but it is striking that, say, about half of people find that antihistamines are helpful. I know a number of people who found the learnings from this study to be impactful in improving their daily quality-of-life.

Seeing this paper and the Reddit experience makes me wonder whether the approach could somehow be scaled: is there a kind of observational, self-reported clinical trial that could sit between Reddit and these manual approaches? Should there be a platform that covers all major chronic conditions, administers ongoing surveys, and tracks longitudinal outcomes?

I don’t really know what the best way to go about this would be, but it feels to me that there could be something important here. There’s a lot of latent data in patients’ subjective experiences that is not today being properly gathered or analyzed.

[Sarrin Chethik @schethik]

6/ This seems tractable given that the recent MAHA strategy report already highlights drug repurposing and similar approaches as major opportunities