If I Had a Billion Dollars… Part One
How would you spend a $1 billion research grant? Here, with suggestions and ideas, are some of our 2024 Power List champions.
| 6 min read | Discussion
Lingjun Li: I would spend a significant portion of the budget to assemble a multi-disciplinary research team with a major goal to train the next generation analytical scientists who can identify significant problems and devise effective solutions and can collaborate with biologists, clinicians, and informatic scientists to tackle the important challenging problem facing the clinical research and health care. Another significant portion of the budget will be used to develop next generation analytical technology and acquire the most advanced instrumentation available in the field. The overall goal is to build an infrastructure to revolutionize MS imaging tools to map diverse biomolecules (proteins, lipids, glycans, PTMs etc) in healthy and diseased tissue, with subcellular resolution and three-dimensional spatial distribution. Further funding will be utilized to disseminate information, spread the technology, and create software tools and build databases that can be widely available to the research community worldwide.
Ying Ge: I would establish a world-leading interdisciplinary research institute, integrating cutting-edge chemistry, biology, and medicine. This institute would tackle the most complex diseases, develop groundbreaking diagnostic and therapeutic technologies, and drive innovation in healthcare.
Frances S. Ligler: Set up a virtual institute with a 10-year lifetime to create, manufacture and deploy sensors that can measure complex toxic components in aquatic species, animals, plants and people over diverse parts of the earth. Analytics would be developed to provide data on the impact of manufacturing, energy creation, agricultural practices, climate change and human habitation. The institute would include researchers from relevant fields of engineering and science, lawyers, communication and policy specialists, and industrial partners.
Michal Holčapek: I would spend it on the establishment of a multiomics laboratory, which will be equipped with cutting-edge instrumentation for individual omics layers, such as lipidomics, metabolomics, glycomics, proteomics, and transcriptomics. Of course, a strong emphasis must be placed on the bioinformatic part of such multiomics integration so that the research group can investigate the biological mechanisms of observed dysregulation in human diseases. Mostly, research groups are doing observational research, which means that they observe some dysregulations of metabolites or proteins for some diseases, but they do not understand the reasons behind such dysregulations. This research is worthy of potential clinical translation, but it still lacks the biological mechanism. If we can integrate multiomics data together with suitable animal or cell line models with the final verification on human data, then we may pave the way towards the development of new drugs targeting dysregulated metabolic pathways. Many researchers dream of this direction, but the complexity of such multidisciplinary integration and the high costs seriously limit the range of laboratories that can afford it. The research groups should have two major goals: 1/ investigate the biological mechanisms of observed dysregulations in selected human diseases, and 2/ translate methodologies for screening and progress monitoring into real clinical practice.
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Renã Robinson: I would build a highly diverse and multidisciplinary team to establish cutting edge proteomics research with global impact to improve health disparities over a decade. I would provide the best analytical technologies on my own and build other national and global centers and create strong infrastructure to support the research goals. Of course, I would buy mass spectrometers but would expand to include other proteomics technology, ‘omics tools, and incorporate automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. This level of funding would provide resources to include community engaged research and support a team and community members in a variety of ways. I could keep going but I think it would be fun to actually try to create a $1billion dollar budget.
Robert Kennedy: If I had a billion dollars I would share it with many colleagues to focus on brain studies with an eye towards diseases of the brain and fundamentals of brain science. Basically, this is similar to the Brain Initiative. Diseases related to brain function are highly costly because they often result in long term care and debilitation. Think about traumatic brain injury, addictions including alcoholism, and neurodegenerative diseases (Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s). Also, many health related issues end up being related to the brain. The remarkable effects of ozempic and related drugs are great examples of altering brain chemistry to affect a behavior and ultimately a health concern (obesity). Finally, the brain remains the most mysterious organ, e.g. understanding how consciousness arises would be a huge scientific breakthrough. All of this requires better measurements.
Ron Heeren: I would establish a center for innovative translational medical technologies, to make the time to market of MedTech innovations substantially shorter. The center would consist of an unique analytical infrastructure, imaging facility, and engineering infrastructure. Augmented with a talent program, embedded industrial and clinical researchers and combined with the appropriate regulatory agencies in the same building. The open structure I would envisage will bring together dynamic interdisciplinary teams that would accelerate discovery, innovation and product development in a translational clinical setting.
J. Michael Ramsey: Managing such a huge research grant would be very exciting and a huge responsibility. There are some unstated parameters in the question such as the grant term and whether it is national or international. I would prefer that the $1B award was an endowment that could fund analytical R&D activities in perpetuity and that it was intended to have an international impact. Such a large award would certainly require a term of at least 10 years to efficiently utilize the capital resources. I would first establish an advisory panel including international experts from a broad spectrum of analytical and related disciplines to identify and prioritize grand challenges confronting the measurement sciences.
Potential projects could be a focused effort, e.g., moving mass spectrometry toward single molecule sensitivity, or broad and interdisciplinary similar to the human genome project. Once a reasonable list of challenges is identified a series of workshops could be organized bringing together thought leaders relevant to the specific challenges to include a breadth of concepts for addressing the challenge goals. The information gathered from the workshops would be used by the advisory panel to further refine the list of challenges and to determine the form and location of research centers addressing specific challenges. This magnitude of funding would hopefully be sufficiently compelling to stimulate local government co-funding to establish infrastructure for a multitude of centers. I would imagine that the research centers would have a combination of intramural and extramural researchers. The topics addressed by the collection of centers would be broad.
