Blog – Why Some Ideas Never Get a Chance

Most researchers are familiar with the experience I am about to describe. You develop an interesting idea for a research project. It’s a bit different. That sort of ‘outside of the box thinking’ we are so often promoted to lean into. You decide to write a grant around it and spend time assembling the team, defining the work packages, costing it… the whole shebang!

The submission deadline approaches so you prepare a final draft and submit it, feeling incredibly confident. You seem to tick the boxes for the work to be in scope and your idea is genuinely novel. This is what the field of dementia research is screaming out for. We have been battling the same issue for decades with little tangible progress. It is time we started focussing on different approaches in our attempt to find real solutions.

The notification day arrives and bang… rejected. I have seen a lot of grant submissions in my time and the ones that got rejected have often been the ones that sounded the most exciting or the most novel. This begs a question… are we taking enough risks in our fight against dementia? Or are our funders too risk adverse to go all in on some truly revolutionary ideas?

This is not a simple question to answer. We know that funding is framed as meritocratic. In theory the best ideas should be funded every time. But who decides what the best ideas are? It’s us with our inherent and subconscious biases. As a result, decisions are often influenced by current trends rather than individual merit. A great example of this is in the trend in industrial funding right now. You might be running a company that is genuinely game changing and revolutionary but if you don’t have a defence angle or some sort of AI application it’s so much harder to get funding.

The same can be said in dementia research. Biomarkers, AI, monoclonal antibodies; they all made headlines in dementia researcher and it’s naïve to assume that decisions haven’t been weighted on if you included the right ‘buzz words’ in your work. I remember a while ago a huge funding call came out and the goal was to diversify dementia research. Spread it across the country and create a national and diverse portfolio of projects that would case a wide net and approach the problem of dementia from many angles. I read over a submission for this that ticked this box beautifully. The group proposed something truly innovative. An approach that had the potential to drastically improve how we study dementia in the lab and remove the burden of animal research. I knew this would get funding.

I was wrong. It was rejected for being too ambitious and here’s the big question. Is it possible to be too ambitious when we are trying to fight a disease that has plagued us and evaded all treatments for decades? What made this harder to understand was the fact that at least 75% of the projects that did get funded were doing essentially the same thing. It was clear that there was a bias towards techniques that had the least amount of risk attached to them. But do you know where risk adversity gets you? Incremental progress. Research that is ‘safe’ that might move the needle slightly. More of what we know already just slightly improved.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes this is exactly what is needed. But we have spent decades chasing answers with limited success. Maybe we should be asking if playing it safe is really the way to move forwards.

If we only ever fund ideas that are likely to work, we may never fund the ideas that actually change things.

This ripples out into how we approach our work too. In academia, if you aren’t getting funding your time is limited. Grants and papers are your currency and without it you either stagnate or lose your job. If we don’t fund the risky but exciting ideas, researchers start going for things that seem to fit a pattern of ‘this will get funded’. We frame our work to include the ‘right’ keywords, techniques and research themes to try and guarantee our tenure. As a result, that initial creative spark (the thing that made the idea exciting) fades more and more over time.

Early career researchers face this dilemma far more than anyone else in academia. If you want to be an academic you need to secure a lectureship. In order to do this your CV must contain papers and grants. What does that mean? It means your career progression is directly tied to how successful you are in securing funding. So what are you likely to do in that scenario if funders think you can be ‘too innovative’? You are most likely to stay within established boundaries. You will play it safe and defer from taking a chance on something unconventional because the cost of failure is so high. It’s so sad to see this play out. Before a proposal has even reached a panel, it has already been shaped by the system you are trying to fit it into.

The result is a loop. Funders prioritise the lower risk proposals. The ‘that’s just about exciting enough to be new but not too exciting to be risky’ ones. Researchers respond by submitting safe bets. It’s not about just one project. Over time this shapes the entire field.

Now, for balance, I must say that this does not mean that all high-risk ideas are good ideas and worthy of hundreds of thousands in funding. It also does not mean that all safe projects lack value. We need incremental research that is vigorous and built on strong foundations. I just wonder if the balance has tipped too far in one direction and we risk limiting our potential for discovery.

There are so many exciting avenues for exploration out there. Whether its replacing animal models with truly innovative human-relevant systems (organoids, iPSC’s, bioprinting etc), use of AI and digital tools, lifestyle studies for prevention that look beyond biology. The list goes on and these could all fundamentally change how we understand and study dementia.

This is key because dementia is not a simple problem. It is highly unlikely that we will solve it through a single breakthrough. We need to create space to challenge the status quo with new ideas, even if they come with uncertainty attached to them. #

The question is not ‘can we afford to take risks?’ It’s whether we can afford not to.

Dr Sam Moxon

Author

Dr Sam Moxon is a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. His expertise falls on the interface between biology and engineering. His PhD focussed on regenerative medicine and he now works on trying to develop 3D bioprinting techniques with human stem cells, so that we better understand and treat degenerative diseases. Outside of the lab he hikes through the Lake District and is an expert on all things Disney.

Follow @DrSamMoxon