Increase Aria budget to £1 billion, says Obama science adviser

The UK’s new “high-risk, high-reward” research funding body, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria), should have an annual budget of at least £1 billion, a former White House science adviser has recommended.

Speaking at an event organised by the thinktank UK Day One at Imperial College London, Tom Kalil, who was deputy director for policy at the White House Office for Science and Technology under Barack Obama, said it was vital to have funding agencies that operated outside the “canonical” system of grants awarded by peer review.

“There are some scientific and technology problems that you will not solve by giving out small grants to professors at universities,” explained Mr Kalil, also an adviser during Bill Clinton’s presidency, during a discussion with Aria chair Matt Clifford on 12 September.

Providing larger grants to the US’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) – and more recently other Arpa bodies focused on energy, health and security – had been crucial to tackling major societal challenges, said Mr Kalil, who is now chief executive of Renaissance Philanthropy, which seeks to connects donors with innovators.

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One Arpa project he helped to support, on accelerating the pace of Ebola vaccine development, had been crucial to funding Moderna, the biotech company behind the Covid jabs used by most Americans, he said.

“There is a value of having a government funder that is allowed to make non-consensus bets,” Mr Kalil said about the difficulty of gaining approval for riskier research projects.

“If you are not investing some of your research budget [in agencies like Arpa], you are missing an opportunity,” he said.

Asked how much he would advise the UK government to invest in Aria – an Arpa-like body that has an initial four-year budget of £800 million – Mr Kalil said: “At least a billion pounds would make a difference.”

“Darpa is a $4 billion [a year venture] – you need to have critical mass for programme directors [to succeed],” he added.

Under the current arrangements, Aria’s eight programme directors can be given up to £50 million to focus on “moonshot” problems – the first of which have been announced, and include creating “programmable plants”, managing climate and weather and creating “smarter robot bodies”.

Arpa had succeeded, in part, because it gave “programme manager a lot of authority”, said Mr Kalil.

Asked what other research initiatives had yielded strong results, Mr Kalil praised the former UK prime minister Gordon Brown for backing advanced market commitments, in which governments “purchase orders for something that does not exist yet”.

That commitment in 2009 led to the creation of vaccines against conditions such as meningitis and pneumonia and has “saved the lives of 700,000 children in developing countries”, said Mr Kalil, who said similar commitments had allowed Moderna to develop Covid vaccines using mRNA technology and encouraged the launch of private space flights.

“In areas where the government is trying to achieve something – and can articulate what it wants – it should incentivise,” he said.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com