Paul Allen estate-backed fund launches with $500M in science grants

The philanthropic ecosystem spun out of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s massive estate is getting bigger.

The Fund for Science and Technology launched Wednesday with plans to fund at least $500 million worth of grants over the next four years. The 501(c)3 nonprofit foundation will support transformational science and technology” in bioscience, the environment and artificial intelligence.

Though it’s years in the making, the fund provides cash to a scientific community that’s reeling with proposed budget cuts, terminated grants and dwindling support from the federal government.

The fund will eventually disburse money throughout the world, but for the first wave of grantees it selected the Benaroya Research Institute, the College of the Environment at University of Washington, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and Seattle Children’s. All Seattle, to show the foundation’s roots.

“With this new foundation we’re bringing Paul’s philanthropic vision to bear,” fund board chair Jody Allen said in a statement. “For decades, Paul and I worked to leverage the power of science and technology innovation to make the world a better place. … In the same way, the foundation will work to build a brighter future for people and the planet.”

Jody Allen, Paul Allen’s sister, is the president of Allen Family Philanthropies, formerly known as the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

The fund is separate from the Allen Family Philanthropies, which pledged $10 million to Washington arts groups on Tuesday. It’s also a different organization than the Allen Institute, a bioscience research nonprofit that Paul Allen founded in 2003.

Created in 2022, the fund worked quietly for the past three years, picking the initial wave of grantees and tapping Dr. Lynda Stuart as its CEO.

Stuart, a former executive director of the Institute of Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine, has connections to the philanthropic world. She was a deputy director for vaccines and biologics at the Gates Foundation.

But her introduction to this new fund came almost out of the blue, as she tells it. She remembers sitting in Washington, D.C., when she received a phone call and was asked what she thought of the opportunity.

She didn’t have much background but she learned that they were interested in bioscience, the environment and AI.

“Those are the most interesting topics on the planet,” Stuart recalled thinking. “How could that possibly be? Has someone read my mind and written a job description for me?”

After a six-month interview process with the board and extensive conversations with Jody Allen, she landed the role.

Stuart said the private foundation will fill in the gaps of a crucial phase for scientific funding – the beginning.

“A lot of funders aren’t very good at funding the idea,” Stuart said in an interview with the Seattle Times. “We will be quite willing to fund the idea, and sometimes it can be something quite early and risky. Where other funders will want things to be without risk before they put their money in, we’re fine with risk.”

Stuart calls it funding science upstream. An example is, in biomedical research, taking something from a twinkle in a scientist’s mind to initial clinical trials.

She said the foundation is seeking to solve, with science, the bigger problems that are more expensive.

“We’re going to be able to take on big problems that require long bets,” Stuart said.

For Fred Hutch, the grant is intended to support the center’s study of cancer’s effects on immune systems and autoimmune diseases, as well as the development of new therapies for cancer.

Dr. Lawrence Fong, scientific director of Immunotherapy Integrated Research Center at Fred Hutchinson, said the funding is critical for the research the center wants to do. With a proposed budget cut of roughly 40% for the National Institutes of Health next year, the future of cancer research looks precarious. Especially when scientists want to take risks on a fresh idea.

“This foundation has been in the works for a few years and predates a lot of the challenges today,” Fong said in an interview with the Seattle Times. “But with the proposed cuts, this type of funding has an even greater impact. It enables us to continue to innovate and move forward instead of throttling back.”

Seattle Children’s will continue phase one trials for research that could result in treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases in children.

University of Washington’s College of the Environment will use the grant to fund research for climate solutions, climate prediction and environmental monitoring.

And the Benaroya Research Institute is working on research to study the immune system with the grant funding.

As Fong said, the fund’s mission predates proposed cuts to the NIH’s budget and terminated grants from the agency that were recently allowed by the U.S. Supreme Court. The fund isn’t a reaction to all of what Stuart calls “the noise” around scientific funding.

“Even if there was a lot of turmoil going on now, that wouldn’t drive us,” Stuart said. “We’re currently building out our long-term strategy and that will involve things that are as far as 10 years out.