A clear line of sight?

Note: Thanks to a lost password, I am locked out of my old blog and have therefore 're-built' the blog on this new account, where I am now periodically adding new posts again

“A clear line-of-sight to therapeutic use will be required to secure funding.”

‘Clear line of sight’ is a phrase that UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has started to use in some of its themed funding calls, to describe how proposals should be positioned relative to eventual real-world impact. And it’s a phrase I rather like. Since seemingly forever, the UKRI research councils have required grant applicants to describe the anticipated impact from their proposed projects. And sometimes this can feel like a surprisingly tricky job, even in the life sciences where (eventual) real-world impact is nearly always the ultimate point of the project.

Why so tricky? Because it's often the case that a single research project, taken alone, won't lead directly to very much in the way of such impact. And thus the temptation can arise to over-promise and describe impacts that, realistically, are not actually going to happen as a direct result of the project. At the lower end of the technology readiness level (TRL) scale (or of the discovery-translation scale that’s sometimes used in the life sciences), much or indeed all of the meaningful direct impact of a project is often going to be academic impact. And, for some, this may beg the question – is academic impact in some way inferior to real-world impact? Does it count for less with a funder whose remit is to bring about tangible benefits for the population at large, and whose budget is far from bottomless?

So what's the point of the research?

Let’s think about both of these related questions for a moment - the point of doing the research and the value of academic impact. Imagine standing on a busy high street and polling passers-by, asking them to rank the importance and value of two hypothetical new scientific discoveries:

1. That a singularity can in fact be observed from the rest of spacetime
2. That a vaccine can be produced to provide general protection against cancer

I suspect that the overwhelming majority would plump for number two. (If it sounds far-fetched, well, yes it’s certainly proving a challenge; but they’re working on it, and artificial intelligence might just hold the keys to cracking it.) Even if we were to plead the case for number one by giving some additional information – “but that means the principle of cause and effect breaks down, and the laws of physics lose their predictive power!” – it would be very difficult for anyone other than a physicist to relate the (actually huge) importance of that hypothetical discovery back to real-world implications for themselves, their family and their friends. What has actually changed, as a result of this research and its findings, that benefits me?

“Ah!” you might cry, “but it’s not the man* on the Clapham omnibus who funds my research!” But of course it is precisely the ordinary person who funds academic research, either through their taxes (e.g. UKRI) or through their donations (e.g. medical-research charities). Am I, then, attempting to steer this argument to the conclusion that real-world impact is indeed of more value than academic impact, because for the people who ultimately foot the bill it’s easier to understand and of far more obvious immediate relevance?

Absolutely not. I am going to take the wise precaution of moving away from theoretical physics at this juncture, safe in the knowledge that funders of research in that discipline are well aware of the value of fundamental research and appear to feel no pressing need to relate every discovery back to things that pretty much everyone can understand. Returning to the safer (for me) ground of the life sciences, it’s very evident that funders here too place considerable value on basic discovery research. But, for the most part, what they don’t have is the luxury of funding research that’s focused on making discoveries just out of curiosity, on addressing gaps in knowledge purely because they exist. Even the promise, abundantly backed up by precedent though it may be, that new knowledge is likely to prove useful in some way at some point in the future is unlikely to persuade life-sciences funders to part with their many-times oversubscribed cash.

Joining the dots

What’s needed then is a clear line of sight towards ultimate benefit for people’s health or well-being. A line of sight that, while it may inevitably include some imponderables and some things that are yet-to-be confirmed, has at the end of it real-world impact that’s sufficiently clearly defined and specific for a would-be funder to appreciate its nature, importance and magnitude. To achieve this, it’s vital to be able to articulate a clear understanding of what the next steps would be after the currently-proposed project ends, and how the outputs and outcomes from the current project would enable and facilitate those next steps. And of course it’s essential to have a really clear vision for why the project should be done at all – what’s the ultimate point from an impact perspective, and why in the context of that ultimate point is the research needed? On a pathway from idea to some form of implementation in the real world – be it new policy, new drugs, new healthcare practices or whatever – where and how does this project fit in? Why does it need to be on that pathway at all?  

Capturing the academic/real-world impact relationship in a proposal

Once we have this insight and understanding, and are able to articulate it clearly and in specific terms, we can produce wording to explain to a would-be funder what the line of sight to beneficial impact looks like. Taking a made-up (and no doubt hopelessly muddled) example, we might write something along the lines of the following:

While near-term impact will primarily benefit other academics working in the area of bacterial biofilm formation and dynamics by way of new knowledge and understanding, our ultimate impact aim is to inform the development of practical interventions to reduce nosocomial infection rates, with clear benefits for hospital patients. Specifically, we anticipate that by elucidating patterns of biofilm development by nosocomial pathogens under different growth conditions, we will facilitate the subsequent development of new therapies for preventing or disrupting colonisation and thereby controlling infection.

The above example contains little in the way of detail, and if it was a real-life example there is much in it that could be unpacked and expanded upon. But it does show that the writer of the proposal understands the point of doing the proposed research, from an ultimate real-world impact perspective. They have a clear line of sight to eventual impact in the area of hospital-infection control.

 * or, indeed, woman – although possibly that was an alien concept to the High-Court judge who invoked the hypothetical ‘Clapham omnibus’ traveller in a 1932 ruling on negligence.    

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