# Ten-year awards for scientists who commit to one hard problem

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-ten-year-hard-problem-awards/  
OnCo record `idea-fund-ten-year-hard-problem-awards` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Give a small number of scientists a decade of guaranteed funding to work on a single hard problem such as dormant cancer cells, with no pressure to publish quickly.

## Summary

The typical grant cycle of three to five years pushes researchers towards problems that yield papers on that timescale. Metastasis, dormancy, cachexia, tumour immunology in cold tumours and undruggable drivers need longer bets. A funder would award 10-year, person-based grants to mid-career investigators who commit to one such problem, assessed at year five on process (data shared, tools built, negative results published) rather than publication counts. Precedents are the Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator model and the Wellcome Trust's long-term fellowships.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: Ten-year awardees working on metastasis, dormancy or cachexia produce more high-impact, reproducible findings per dollar by year ten than matched investigators on conventional grants, with more tool and model outputs and fewer but larger papers.
- Rationale: Studies of HHMI investigators show they produce more highly-cited and more novel work, and more flops, than matched NIH R01 holders; the freedom to fail is what makes long problems approachable. Cancer philanthropy already runs people-based programmes but mostly with short horizons.
- Proposed test: Fund 20 awardees against 20 matched controls and pre-register the comparison metrics (novelty of citations, replication rate of key claims, tools adopted by others) for assessment at years five and ten.
- Maturity: speculative
- Actor: philanthropy

## Sources

- HHMI Investigator Program: https://www.hhmi.org/programs/biomedical-research/investigator-program

## Connected records

- ideas: [A dedicated programme for cachexia and treatment toxicity research](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-cachexia-programme/), [A ring-fenced metastasis programme with metastasis-specific endpoints](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-metastasis-moonshot/)
- people: [Charles Swanton](https://onco.cc/people/charles-swanton/), [Klaus Pantel](https://onco.cc/people/klaus-pantel/)
- bottlenecks: [Dormant cells and minimal residual disease](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-dormancy-mrd/), [Funding follows fashion, not burden](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-funding-allocation/), [Metastasis is understood least and studied last](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-metastasis-biology/)

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