The late Paul G. Allen, who amassed billions as a cofounder of Microsoft, devoted a large share of his philanthropy to ambitious scientific, biological and technological goals — like mapping the human brain, understanding the immune system or developing beneficial uses of AI. Though he died in 2018 at age 65, he left behind a well-funded constellation of institutes and funding entities that have made multimillion-dollar commitments to advance research, sometimes partnering with local and national public research organizations like the National Science Foundation.
The newest entrant to the world of Allen philanthropy is the Fund for Science and Technology (FFST). Jody Allen, Paul’s sister and long a key force in the family’s philanthropy, is board chair of the new foundation. Also on the board is mega-billionaire Steve Ballmer, former Microsoft CEO and cofounder of the Ballmer Group.
Though the Allen team created the Fund for Science and Technology in 2022, hiring and operational gestation took a few years, and it was only this summer, according to the fund, that it was sufficiently staffed to commence grantmaking. The fund recently announced the first round of grants out of its initial $3.1 billion endowment, committing at least $500 million over the next four years as it commences its mission to focus on Allen’s longtime interests in bioscience, the environment and AI. I spoke recently with Lynda Stuart, FFST’s inaugural president and CEO, to learn more about the fund’s goals and expected grantmaking approaches.
Funding work at the intersection of bioscience, environment and AI
“We have a formal philanthropic mandate to support across these three areas of bioscience, the environment and AI,” Stuart told me. “But I’m actually interested not just in those three pillars, but in where they intersect. You can imagine that there’s important applications of biology and bioengineering in environmental applications, or of AI in accelerating biological design, or in the role of AI in the environment. We don’t see those three pillars as distinct — we see them as overlaps.”
So what kind of grants will FFST make? First of all, pretty sizable ones, typically of millions of dollars each. The recently announced first round of grants, totaling $15 million, is directed not at individual research studies, but to support major institutional programs, reflecting the foundation’s goal to empower institutions to drive progress in broad fields of research. The initial grants were spread among four established research institutions based in Seattle, Paul Allen’s hometown and the base for Allen philanthropy more generally.
Of the first grantees, $10 million went to the College of the Environment at the University of Washington to support research into climate and environmental science. The remaining $5 million went to three other important Seattle institutions. Benaroya Research Institute got support for its biorepository of biological samples used in research. The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center received funding to study the immune system’s role in cancer and autoimmune disease and for the development of new cell therapies for cancer. And money went to Seattle Children’s to continue research studies of pediatric cellular immunotherapy treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases, and to fund new research to create cell therapies for young people.
While FFST may well make future grants in the Seattle area, it has a global outlook. “We deliberately made those first investments within Seattle because we wanted to acknowledge Paul’s origins within the city and to shine a light on some of the amazing centers of excellence here,” Stuart said. “But we are a global funder, and we’ll fund across the nation and across the world — we’re already looking at grants in other parts of the U.S. and in other countries.”
Stuart, a physician-scientist, comes to FFST with an international background that seems like good preparation to assess the kinds of cross-discipline solutions the foundation seeks to foster. She earned her undergraduate, medical and Ph.D. degrees in the U.K., and has more than 20 years of experience in research in immunology and global health, including in the translation of research into real-world therapeutics and products. She was executive director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine, which is focused on AI-enabled protein design. She was also previously vice president of infectious disease at BioNTech, a company that gained wide recognition for its development of COVID-19 vaccine technology. And Stuart also has experience in big bioscience philanthropy: She was deputy director, global health at the Gates Foundation, where she oversaw COVID-19 vaccine development.
Related Inside Philanthropy Resources:
For Subscribers Only
FFST aims to use “all the elements of the philanthropic toolkit”
As for its grantmaking approach, FFST investments going forward will not be restricted to the sort of established academic and research institutions it’s supporting with its first round of grants. “What’s clear from my history in philanthropy is that you can have impact in different ways,” Stuart said, adding that FFST is willing to use all the elements of the philanthropic toolkit, as she put it. These include grants to academic organizations, but also program-related investments that can advance FFST’s goals, such as investments in companies and FROs, or focused research organizations: a relatively new type of research entity, often backed by philanthropic dollars, that coordinates large teams to tackle scientific efforts too large for any single institution.
“If you use all the parts of the toolkit, you can have massive impact,” Stuart said. For now, FFST will seek out and make strategic grants on its own; it’s possible, though less likely, that it will put out RFPs.
Translating research from the lab to solutions that can benefit the public will also be part of FFST’s work, and will typically involve bringing together different types of organizations and expertise. “Sometimes, an idea needs to go into a commercial entity, and then that commercial entity needs to to take it into the world,” Stuart said. “You actually need different financial mechanisms for each of those steps. If we’re interested in biotechs or startups that are mission aligned, we can use our endowment for investments. But we’ll use any of those philanthropic tools because we want to be able to engage across any type of organization that can have impact.”
As Paul Allen’s philanthropic legacy continues to evolve, and given the multibillion-dollar scale of the fortune he left behind, there are sure to be more major investments in science and technology to come out of FFST and the Allen world. FFST, for example, still has about $2.5 billion beyond the $500 committed so far, and given the Allen family’s long-term approach to science philanthropy, may well continue growing down the line.
